On the eve of Salma's twenty-first birthday, friends and family travel to New York for a celebration reluctantly organized by her grandfather Darwish. As the guests make their way to the party, each journey takes on a greater significance than a simple trip to the city, as they find themselves examining their pasts, their relationships to one another, and to the country in which they live. Between Cairo and New York, Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge paints a vivid portrait of a fragmented Arab-American family, one struggling to become whole again and to let go of the past.

A rich and sensitive novel about loss and alienation, about life lived in exile, and about the search for home, shortlisted for the Arabic Booker

About the Author
Ezzedine C. Fishere is an acclaimed Egyptian writer, academic, and diplomat. He has written numerous successful and bestselling novels and he also writes political articles for Arabic, English, and French news outlets. He currently teaches at Dartmouth College in the US, where he lives. John Peate is a translator, university lecturer, academic researcher, and language consultant based in the UK.

Reviews

"Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge is a remarkable novel for its style, its plot, and its reach into the experience of straddling two worlds and two states of being."--Banipal


"Ezzedine Choukri Fishere . . . taking his literary career to new heights."--Egypt Independent


"A beautiful, unique novel."--Gamal al-Ghitani, author of Zayni Barakat


"A deeper view of the world of Arabs abroad . . . [Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge] represents the symbol of Arab immigrants without carrying their usual stereotypical qualities ... Fishere offers no simple solutions to his characters and doesn't try to preach in one way or another, but rather to flash a light on a different dimension and let his heroes do the talking."--Al-Ahram Online


"Fishere's method movingly teases out the spaces between belonging and forced, awkward fits, and the result is certain to endure in the reader's consciousness . . . . [Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge] is "Mrs. Dalloway" for an age when conversations about immigration, particularly from Arab nations, dominate--a gripping portrait of the tenuous spaces that marginalized populations are made to occupy, and a searing examination of the struggle to belong."--Foreword Reviews

Book Information
ISBN 9789774168192
Author Ezzedine C. Fishere
Format Paperback
Page Count 168
Imprint Hoopoe
Publisher The American University in Cairo Press
Weight(grams) 163g
Dimensions(mm) 205mm * 130mm * 23mm