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Book Lists for Adults

Book Lists for Adults

SWANA Heritage Month for Adults

April's commemoration has been observed under various names, such as Arab American Heritage Month or Middle Eastern North African (MENA) Heritage Month. SCPL Strives to be inclusive of the many diverse peoples and cultures that span the Southwest Asian and North African region. SWANA is a geographical and apolitical term that many libraries and academic institutions have adopted to honor the numerous rich traditions and heritages of this vast region.

Bouazzaoui, Soraya
TEMPTRESS. MONSTER. WARRIOR. Aicha is the story of Morocco's warrior goddess, her strange magic, fierce rebellion, and devastating romance. Soraya Bouazzaoui weaves an epic tale of female rage and hidden myths, perfect for fans of The City of Brass  and  The Stardust Thief.   The Portuguese empire has planted its flag across Morocco, ruling with an iron fist. But eventually, all empires must fall.   Aicha, the daughter of a Moroccan freedom-fighter, was born for battle. She has witnessed the death of her people, their starvation and torture at the hands of the occupiers, and it has awakened an anger within her. An anger that burns hot and bright and that speaks to Aicha’s soul.   Only Aicha’s secret lover, Rachid, a rebellion leader, knows how to soothe her. But as the fight for Morocco’s freedom reaches its violent climax, the creature that simmers beneath Aicha’s skin begs to be unleashed. It hungers for the screams of those who have caused her pain, and it will not be ignored.
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Darraj, Susan Muaddi, author.
FICTION DAR
"A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore--from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich--shows lives which intersect across divides of class, generation and religion"-- Provided by publisher.

Abdel Gawad, Aisha, author.
FICTION ABD
"A deeply moving family story about identity, faith, and belonging set in the Muslim immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan. It's the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents' roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance. Meanwhile, outside the family's apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone's motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust? A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America"-- Provided by publisher.

Baconi, Tareq, author.
BIO BACONI
From the renowned Palestinian scholar, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.

Sams, Saba
ON ORDER

Hashem, Sara, author.
SCIENCE FICTION HAS
"At ten years old, the Heir of Jasad fled a massacre that takes her entire family. At fifteen, she buried her first body. At twenty, the clock is ticking on Sylvia's third attempt at home. Nizahl's armies have laid waste to Jasad and banned magic across the four remaining kingdoms. Fortunately, Sylvia's magic is as good at playing dead as she is. When the Nizahl Heir tracks a group of Jasadis to Sylvia's village, the quiet life she's crafted unravels. Calculating and cold, Arin's tactical brilliance is surpassed only by his hatred for magic. When a mistake exposes Sylvia's magic, Arin offers her an escape: compete as Nizahl's Champion in the Alcalah tournament and win immunity from persecution. To win the deadly Alcalah, Sylvia must work with Arin to free her trapped magic, all while staying a step ahead of his efforts to uncover her identity. But as the two grow closer, Sylvia realizes winning her freedom means destroying any chance of reuniting Jasad under her banner. The scorched kingdom is rising again, and Sylvia will have to choose between the life she's earned and the one she left behind"-- Provided by publisher.

Aziza, Sarah, author.
BIO AZIZA
"You were dead, Sarah, you were dead." In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother. In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure--and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her."--Amazon.

892.74 LIG
Offers a wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. This collection constitutes a collective effort to organize and center Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle. As political discourse shifts toward futurism as a means of reimagining a better way of living, beyond the violence and limitations of colonialism, Light in Gaza imagines what the future of Gaza could be, while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation. --From publisher description.

Alyan, Hala, 1986- author.
808 ALY
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection--a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form--small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement. These poems take stock of who and what can displace you from home and from your own body--and, conversely, the kind of resilience, tenacity, and love that can bring you back into yourself and into the context of past and future generations. Hala Alyan asks, What stops you from transforming into someone or something else? When you have lived a life in flux, how do you find rest?

Matar, Hisham, 1970- author.
FICTION MAT
"One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words - and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zawa - Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. To even tell his mother and father back home what he has done, on tapped phone lines, would jeopardize their safety. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zawa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life. It is a friendship that not only sustains him, but eventually forces him, as the Arab Spring erupts, to confront agonizing tensions between revolution and safety, family and exile, and how to define his own sense of self against those closest to him"-- Provided by publisher.

El Akkad, Omar, 1982- author.
BIO EL AKKAD
From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an empire that doesn't consider you fully human. On October 25th, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." This tweet was viewed more than ten million times. One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This chronicles the deep fracture that has occurred for Black, brown, Indigenous Americans, as well as the upcoming generation, many of whom had clung to a thread of faith in Western ideals, in the idea that their countries, or the countries of their adoption, actually attempted to live up to the values they espouse.

Assadi, Hannah Lillith, author.
FICTION ASS
The intimate, sweeping tale of one man's restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope. All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien's shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948's Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he's ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way-although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona. Sufien's life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner's stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife-and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with "the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first," and yet they throb with light-not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived. Like all of our dead, Sufien still tries to speak, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

Mahloudji, Sanam
Longlisted for The Women's Prize Named a most anticipated book by Electric Literature , Publishers Weekly , The BBC, Daily Mail (London), and more A darkly funny, life-affirming debut novel following five women from a once illustrious Iranian family as they grapple with revolutions personal and political. Meet the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they're nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone but is sometimes visited by Niaz, her Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose and yet manages to survive. Elizabeth's daughters wound up in America: Shirin, a charismatic and flamboyantly high-flying event planner in Houston, who considers herself the family's future, and Seema, a dreamy idealist turned housewife languishing in the chaparral-filled hills of Los Angeles. And then there's the other granddaughter, Bita, a disillusioned law student in New York City trying to find deeper meaning by quietly giving away her belongings. When an annual vacation in Aspen goes wildly awry and Shirin ends up in jail, the family's upper-class veneer is cracked open. Shirin embarks upon a quest to restore the family name to its former glory, but what does that mean in a country where the Valiats never mattered? Can they bring their old inheritance into a new tomorrow? By turns satirical and philosophical, spanning from 1940s Iran to a splintered 2000s, The Persians upends the reader's expectations while exploring questions about love, family, money, art, and how to find yourself and each other when your country is lost. Wry and witty, brazen and absurd, The Persians is a deeply moving reinvention of the American family saga.
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Orhan, Kenan, 1993- author.
FICTION ORH
A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell--where she is an unlikely inmate--in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.

Aboulela, Leila, 1964- author.
FICTION ABO
"This enchanting and eye-opening new novel from Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela follows an embattled young woman coming of age during the Mahdist War in nineteenth-century Sudan, and illuminates the tensions that shape her course: between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. In River Spirit, Aboulela gives us the unforgettable story of a people who--against the odds and for a brief time--gained independence from foreign rule through their willpower, subterfuge, and sacrifice."--Dust jacket flap.

El-Mohtar, Amal, author.
SCIENCE FICTION EL
"Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories is a collection of acclaimed and awarded work from Amal El-Mohtar. With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose. Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Iron: Stories includes 'Seasons of Glass and Iron,' 'The Green Book,' 'Madeleine,' 'The Lonely Sea in the Sky,' 'And Their Lips Rang with the Sun,' 'The Truth About Owls,' 'A Hollow Play,' 'Anabasis,' 'To Follow the Waves,' 'John Hollowback and the Witch,' 'Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers,' 'Pockets,' and more." -- Provided by publisher.

Cypher, Sarah, author.
FICTION CYP
"A young, queer Palestinian American woman pieces together her great-aunt's secrets in this sweeping debut, a family saga confronting questions of sexual identity, exile, and lineage. In a Pacific Northwest hospital far from the Rummani family's ancestral home in Palestine, the heart of a stillborn baby begins to beat and her skin turns a vibrant, permanent cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rummanis' centuries-old soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in an air strike. The family matriarch and keeper of all Rummani lore, Aunt Nuha, believes that the blue girl embodies their sacred history, harkening to a time when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a legendary love. Decades later, Betty returns to her Aunt Nuha's gravestone, faced with a difficult decision: Should she stay in the only country she's ever known or should she follow her heart for the woman she loves, perpetuating her family's cycle of exile? Betty finds her answer in partially translated notebooks that reveal her aunt's complex life and struggle with her own sexuality, which Nuha hid to help the family emigrate to the United States. But, as Betty soon discovers, her aunt hid much more than that. The Skin and Its Girl is a searing, poetic tale about desire and identity, and a provocative exploration of how we let stories divide, unite, and define us--and even wield the power to restore a broken family. Sarah Cypher is that rare debut novelist who writes with the mastery and flair of a seasoned storyteller"-- Provided by publisher.

Anechoum, Emanuela, 1991- author.
FICTION ANE
Mina is thirty and living in London. She fled there at twenty to reinvent herself to escape her small-town past, but a decade later she is drifting, untethered and uncertain. When her Moroccan-born father Omar dies, she returns to her childhood home on the Calabrian coast, where he ran a bar called the Tangerinn. It was more than just a bar--it was a gathering place, a haven for migrants and misfits, a dream that Mina's sister, Aisha, is struggling to keep alive. In searching for traces of her father, Mina begins to piece together her own fractured sense of identity. As she reconnects with the memories embedded in the land, she must confront what it means to belong--not just to a place, but to a lineage, a language, a self.

Rushdie, Salman, author.
FICTION RUS
"In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long-forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history. After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl's mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana's comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga--literally 'victory city'--the wonder of the world. Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana's life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga's, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways: the hubris of those in power. Whispering Bisnaga and its citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that Parvati set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world. But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception. As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry--with Pampa Kampana at its center"-- Provided by publisher.

Mishra, Pankaj, author.
956.943 MIS
The postwar global order was in many ways shaped in response to the Holocaust. That event became the benchmark for atrocity, and, in the Western imagination, the paradigmatic genocide. Its memory orients so much of our thinking, and crucially, forms the basic justification for Israel's right first to establish itself and then to defend itself. But in many parts of the world, ravaged by other conflicts and experiences of mass slaughter, the Holocaust's singularity is not always taken for granted, even when its hideous atrocity is. Outside of the West, Pankaj Mishra argues, the dominant story of the twentieth century is that of decolonization. The World After Gaza takes the current war, and the polarized reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of two competing narratives of the last century: the Global North's triumphant account of victory over totalitarianism and the spread of liberal capitalism, and the Global South's hopeful vision of racial equality and freedom from colonial rule. At a moment when the world's balance of power is shifting, and the Global North no longer commands ultimate authority, it is critically important that we understand how and why the two halves of the world are failing to talk to each other. As old touchstones and landmarks crumble, only a new history with a sharply different emphasis can reorient us to the world and worldviews now emerging into the light. In this concise, powerful, and pointed treatise, Mishra reckons with the fundamental questions posed by our present crisis--about whether some lives matter more than others, how identity is constructed, and what the role of the nation-state ought to be. The World After Gaza is an indispensable moral guide to our past, present, and future.