Homeland Elegies

Homeland Elegies

2020 • 384 pages

Ratings20

Average rating4.3

15

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and author of American Dervish, an American son and his immigrant father search for belonging -- in post-Trump America, and with each other. Homeland Elegies is an astonishing and deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams. Drawn from Akhtar's life as the son of Muslim immigrants, it blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure -- at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a nation in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the unhealed wounds of 9/11 continue to 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 Davos to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan. All the while, he spares no one -- neither himself, nor his loved ones, nor his fellow Americans -- any indignity in order to make better sense of it all.

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August 12, 2022
Gabbyhm
GabbySupporter

I'm always a little leery of autofiction, and this was the sort that I tend to find irritating (where the memoir-esque elements are very strong). And while I understand the vignette-type structure, I rarely enjoy reading it and that held true here as well.

July 13, 2021

A novel that reads like a memoir, and who knows what's fact and what's fiction? In any case, it's fascinating, beautifully written, and incredibly insightful.

July 13, 2021