A “profound and provocative” new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging–in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A …
Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly
“Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.” –Salman Rushdie
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.
Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one–least of all himself–in the process.
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This novel should be required reading for everyone in America. Akhtar mixes love for the idea of America with rage at its imperfections and sadness at how far we’ve slipped from whatever noble ideals we once held. Read it, read it, read it!
An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.
With Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar has found the perfect hybrid form for his exuberant, insightful, and wickedly entertaining epic about Muslim immigrants and their American-born children. A deeply moving father-and-son story unfolds against tumultuous current events in a book that anyone wanting to know how we as a nation got where we are today — and into what dark wood we might be heading tomorrow — should read.
Homeland Elegies was very well written and interesting, but a tough book to recommend because it’s not an easy read. I did learn a lot about Muslims and how America treats them and how they feel living here, even when they are born and raised here. So much of it was interesting, but some of it I head to push through. I am glad I read it, though.
I didn’t care for the book in the beginning, but I liked it more as I read on. I believe I would have liked the book more if it had been a collection of essays rather than a novel.
Hard to take. Very honest.
Homeland Elegies was a revelation, a chance to see American culture and history and politics from the viewpoint of an ‘outsider,’ even if that outsider was American born.
Ayad Akhtar has written a novel with a strong narrative voice that reads like memoir. It’s compelling storyline and conflicted characters engage the reader. It is also a novel of ideas, a dissection of social and political culture.
How Christian is America? Consider the commercialization of Christian holy days, the Christian based place names of cities, the King James Bible language and words that are woven in our writing and speech, how we do personal hygiene, dogs in every home.
The accumulation of wealth, buying sprees dependent on credit cards and interest, and the importance of corporate wealth and the power it wields is another theme. It’s a Wonderful Life, that beloved Christmas movie, the narrator realizes, was really about money and power.
Central to the novel is the experience of living in a racist culture, especially after 9-11. When the narrator’s car breaks down in rural Pennsylvania, the narrator finds himself vulnerable.
The narrator travels to Pakistan to visit family. Is returning to one’s family homeland the answer? The anger that fuels people here is also found abroad.
“America is my home,” the narrator affirms.
Homeland Elegies, this poem that mourns the country of our hopes and dreams, reveals our character like a mirror. It isn’t pretty.
I was given access to a free galley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.
An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book… brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.
At the core of this flashing, kinetic coil of a story — part 1001 Nights, part Reality TV — is a passionate, wrenching portrayal of Americans exiled into ‘otherness’.
Homeland Elegies is the astonishing work of an absolutely brilliant writer. With exquisite prose and lacerating honesty, Ayad Akhtar reveals the intersections of art, finance, race, religion, academia, and empire, and in the process, shows us a troubled reflection of our country in the twenty-first century.