A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST AND ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘I read it in a fever, swept up in the kind of rapture you fall into when your most audacious friend kicks off on a hilarious, outrageous, but deeply sincere rant’ Torrey Peters, Guardian Books of the Summer
‘A beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of THE GREAT GATSBY’ New York Times
A deeply personal novel of identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, HOMELAND ELEGIES blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part satire, part picaresque, at its heart it is the story of a father and son, and the country they call home.
Ranging from the heartland towns of America to palatial suites in Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, Akhtar forges a narrative voice that is original as it is exuberantly entertaining. This is a world in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear and the unhealed wounds of 9/11 continue to wreak havoc. HOMELAND ELEGIES is a novel written in love and anger, which spares no one, least of all the author himself.
‘I read it in a fever, swept up in the kind of rapture you fall into when your most audacious friend kicks off on a hilarious, outrageous, but deeply sincere rant’ Torrey Peters, Guardian Books of the Summer
‘A beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of THE GREAT GATSBY’ New York Times
A deeply personal novel of identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, HOMELAND ELEGIES blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part satire, part picaresque, at its heart it is the story of a father and son, and the country they call home.
Ranging from the heartland towns of America to palatial suites in Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, Akhtar forges a narrative voice that is original as it is exuberantly entertaining. This is a world in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear and the unhealed wounds of 9/11 continue to wreak havoc. HOMELAND ELEGIES is a novel written in love and anger, which spares no one, least of all the author himself.
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Reviews
An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, HOMELAND ELEGIES thrusts us into the heart of a father-son relationship and in the process - improbably - does nothing short of laying bear the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare... Stunning
Ayad Akhtar offers up his heart and life with an honesty that astonishes. Never have I experienced such a reading thrill
A passionate, wrenching portrayal of Americans exiled into otherness by a post 9/11 world
A triumph. Akhtar rages, he sings, he indicts, he falls in love, he sorrows, he dreams, he mourns, he transcribes! - and finally he transmutes injustice into the sublimest art
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
Provocative and urgent... a revelation
The challenge of remembering one's identity in a racist culture is at the heart of Akhtar's remarkable new book, HOMELAND ELEGIES...It would not surprise me if it wins him a second Pulitzer Prize
This is the book of the year
Part fiction, part memoir, and all brilliant
Perhaps the best American novel I have read in several years
A beautiful novel about an American son and his immigrant father that has echoes of The Great Gatsby