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by: Mai Al-Nakib
Recommended Age: YA (13+ years and above)
Lexile: unknown
Content Warning(s): abuse, death/grief, violence, war
Book Summary
"Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from California after her mother’s death, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy – which carries with it the threat of execution – Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all.
Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. Interspersed with her narratives are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in old Kuwait and swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America, and her ayah Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to help raise Sara and her brother Karim.
Spanning Kuwait, Lebanon, Iraq, India and the United States, An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale."
My Thoughts
My last book of 2023, An Unlasting Home, was a window into life in Kuwait, Iraq, Lebanon, the United States, and India in the 19th and 20th centuries. Despite the fact that the three generations of women featured in this story were separated by miles and led vastly different lives, they were all connected by invisible strings.
I was heavily invested and enjoyed the book for the most part; however, the band of characters was so large and complicated that I had a pretty hard time keeping them straight. While the story centers around Sara, a main element of the book was showing how each woman played a role in shaping each other's lives. Sometimes, I really wish that Al-Nakib had kept the crew slightly smaller. The book starts with an intimidating and extensive family tree, so while I knew there was going to be confusion at some points, I didn't know that I would spend a lot of time reading the book confused about who each new character was, their background, and what they were fighting for.
Despite the confusion, An Unlasting Home was an inspiring tale of resistance, whether Sara was resisting Kuwait's blasphemy laws that cracked down on freedom of expression, Noura's desire to separate herself from her identity as a wife and mother, or Lulwa's struggle with reconciling with her estranged mother.
There are three parts to the book: part one rotates between Sara's point of view (in the present) and her maternal grandmother, Lulwa's, and paternal grandmother, Yasmine's, points of view. Part two focuses on Sara, her mother, Noura, and her Indian ayah and mother figure, Maria. Part three is narrated entirely by Sara and flips between the past (her childhood and her college experience in the US as she grappled with the realities of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the consequences it posed) and the present, where she faces a dangerous blasphemy trial in a Kuwaiti court.
After this first brush with Kuwaiti, Iraqi, and Lebanese history, I'm eager to find more about the conflicts and find stories set in the Middle East, as I've noticed a lack of Middle Eastern representation in fiction novels, and more importantly, novels targeted towards young adults.
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