First published 2016
Poet Jacob sits at the razor's edge of remembrance, stalked by Satan and Death while 14 saints hover nearby. Trapped in a psychological battleground spanning Cairo, Beirut, San Francisco, and Stockholm, Jacob confronts a life marked by radical displacement: born in an Egyptian whorehouse, raised by a wealthy father, surviving the AIDS crisis as a gay Arab man. His mind becomes a fragmented landscape where painful memories clash with the temptation of total forgetting. Each moment threatens to unravel or reconstruct his sense of self, as supernatural entities prod him toward revelation or erasure. Jacob must navigate the treacherous terrain between remembering and obliterating his own complex history.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, psychological-thriller, gay-fiction
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: United States, Lebanon, Beirut, San Francisco, Cairo
294 pages · Hardcover · Atlantic Monthly Press
Content warnings: mental-illness