By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award
finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a
transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey
among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island.
Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee
camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her
friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her
beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for
decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of 30 years,
Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of
Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the
camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses, bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely
resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to
protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert
her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep
connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course
of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the
circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own
constraints in helping them.
Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih
Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most
wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other
refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a
bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable
spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.
