Join us as we celebrate the release of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel, The Wrong End of the Telescope. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp’s children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya’s secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants’ displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.
Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina’s own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.
About the Author: Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; and the story collection The Perv. In 2019, he won the Dos Passos Prize. He tweets at @rabihalameddine.
The Wrong End of the Telescope will be released on September 21. To order the book, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"No one writes fiction that is more naturally an extension of lived life than this master storyteller… Engaging and unsettling in equal measure."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
New Dominion Bookshop Book Order Form
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Rabih Alameddine photo credit: Oliver Wasow