by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
First published 2021
Arezu travels to Spain as a teenage girl to meet her Iranian father, but he abandons her at his apartment with only a weekly allowance delivered by Omar, his forty-year-old Lebanese step-nephew. Omar draws the vulnerable teenager into a destructive sexual relationship that devastates her at the threshold of adulthood. Twenty years later, Arezu inherits the same apartment and returns with her friend Ellie, an Israeli-American academic who champions Palestinian rights. Together they sift through the rooms where Arezu's trauma occurred, finally giving voice to experiences she has kept silent for decades. As Arezu confronts what happened that summer, she and Ellie examine questions of power, sexuality, and survival that stretch across continents and generations. The excavation becomes both literal and emotional as Arezu works to transform her buried pain into understanding.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, family-life, contemporary
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Spain, Iran, Lebanon
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
288 pages · Hardcover · Mariner Books
Content warnings: abuse, sexual-assault