Woman Is No Man : A Novel

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA READ WITHJENNATODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICKA GOODREADS CHOICE AWARDS FINALIST FOR BEST FICTION AND BEST DEBUTBOOKBROWE'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A MARIE CLAIREBEST WOMEN'S FICTION OF THE YEAR A REAL SIMPLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A POPSUGAR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR ALL WRITTEN BY FEMALESA New York Times Book ReviewEditors ChoiceA Washington Post 10 Books to Read in MarchA Newsweek Best Book of theSummerA USA Today Best Book of the Week A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel ARefinery 29Best Books of the Month A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month ANew ArabBest Books by Arab AuthorsAn Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2019Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled HosseinisA Thousand Splendid Suns...Etaf Rums debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.Refinery 29In her debut novel Etaf Rum tells the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their communitya story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand,A Woman Is No Man is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect."e;Where I come from, weve learned to silence ourselves. Weve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard ofdangerous, the ultimate shame.Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the nave and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have childrenfour daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isras oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareedas insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya cant help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight.But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her familyknowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.