book cover of American Fever
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American Fever

(2022)
A novel by

 
 
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"A funny and affecting novel...a wonderful new spin on the coming-of-age story. A smart, charming debut." (Kirkus, starred review)

"A fascinating mix of immigrant tale, coming-of-age narrative, and cultural exposition...tackling some of the big migration questions of home and identity." (Booklist)
This is a fearless, exacting, essential work, and marks the debut of a thrilling new global voice.”—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

On a year-long exchange program in rural Oregon, a Pakistani student, sixteen-year-old Hira, must swap Kashmiri chai for volleyball practice and try to understand why everyone around her seems to dislike Obama.  A skeptically witty narrator, Hira finds herself stuck between worlds. The experience is memorable for reasons both good and bad; a first kiss, new friends, racism, Islamophobia, homesickness. Along the way Hira starts to feel increasingly unwell until she begins coughing up blood, and receives a diagnosis of tuberculosis, pushing her into quarantine and turning her newly established home away from home upside down. 

American Fever is a compelling and laugh-out-loud funny novel about adolescence, family, otherness, religion, the push-and-pull of home. It marks the entrance on the international literary scene of the brilliant fresh voice of Dur e Aziz Amna. 


Genre: Literary Fiction

Praise for this book

"Hira's is a voice I won't soon forget; her biting intelligence, her irreverence, and her wit blazes through this riveting, brilliant novel which stuns in its insights, its sensitive understanding of the complexities of identity, of what home means, and what it means to exist within a globalized world. A searing debut." - Aamina Ahmad

"A loving and unflinching exploration of home and homeland, the ways they make and unmake us, how they feed us and also eat away our insides. Amna's crystalline prose reflects and refracts, dazzles and captivates." - Nawaaz Ahmed

"American Fever is the unforgettable story of a teenage girl in a year of transformation. Dur e Aziz Amna navigates the choppy waters of adolescence with blistering insight and humour, and exquisitely captures the way we can long for home while yearning to escape it. Rarely does a book sharpen how you see the world around you, but American Fever does just that. It dazzled me on every page." - Julie Buntin

"Marks the debut of a thrilling new global voice." - Peter Ho Davies

"An utterly hypnotic, witty and brilliant novel about young Hira's journey across two oceans... Dur E Aziz Amna's virtuosic way with language kept me enthralled the whole way through. This book is a necessary next-leveling of diasporic consciousness, the unraveling of borders between homeland and newfound home that happens inside of us." - Tanwi Nandini Islam

"Brave, tender-hearted, and painfully bittersweet, American Fever is a sharply observed debut that announces Dur e Aziz Amna as a brilliant new voice." - Fatima Farheen Mirza

"American Fever is a fresh, fierce bildungsroman - a story of homesickness and adolescent ache, not to mention a biting meta-commentary on what we expect from immigrant narratives. It's a relief to witness America as Hira does, seeing it clearly as an absurd, flawed nation that is all too often, as Hira says, a concept on whose behalf immigrants are unreasonably asked to testify." - Sanjena Sathian

"American Fever is an extraordinarily assured and gripping debut. The intelligence, humour and longing of Hira's voice, as she negotiates what it means to belong to a place, will certainly stay with me." - Ayşegül Savaş

"A poetic, memorable novel. I loved it. Hira is a marvellous creation - American Fever marks the arrival of a hugely promising writer." - Mirza Waheed


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