Omar El Akkad recommends
My Friends (2024)Hisham Matar"My Friends is quite possibly Hisham Matar's best work yet, and that's saying something. A quiet detonation of a novel, this masterful inquiry into the nature of friendship, exile and place is not so much to be read as lived through. The depth of thought, the unflinchingly honest confrontation with loss and longing, is there on every page, in every moment. Very few writers alive can converse with negative space the way Matar does, and My Friends is stunning, beautiful proof."The Refugee Ocean (2023)Pauls Toutonghi"There is a tender fearlessness that runs through The Refugee Ocean, a book as unflinching in its depiction of conflict as it is anchored to the healing power of art. Pauls Toutonghi has written such a richly imagined and emotionally complex story set where the grand sweep of history collides with the innate human desire for shelter, connection and beauty. The result is an unforgettable novel about the way the lives of the displaced can echo through decades and across oceans, the way we are, even or perhaps especially when unanchored from the places of our birth, bound to one another." Wellness (2023)Nathan Hill"Wellness is such a beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes satirical but most of all honest book about the many people a person becomes - the way a life, in time, inevitably upends itself. A love story of dislodged chronology, Nathan Hill's brilliant interrogation of a single relationship spiderwebs out into almost every facet of our contemporary anxieties. Few writers working today have dissected, with such a sharp scalpel, the fundamental paradox of modern American life: this hopelessly broken need to fix what may not need fixing, to reach with utter desperation for a version of better that may not be better at all. Read Wellness with caution: it lays so much of our little self-deceptions bare." Dearborn (2023)Ghassan Zeineddine"The stories in Dearborn-by turns hilarious and heartbreaking, astute and absurd-capture such a vital, underspoken aspect of the Arab-American experience, that sense of being not quite from the place you love and not quite loved by the place you're from. Ghassan Zeineddine has a talent for those very small details of Arab life in a place like Dearborn-the generational fatalism, the converted garage living room, the unlikely mash-up of cuisines at the neighborhood restaurant. These are wonderful stories from an exciting new name in Arab-American literature." Between Two Moons (2023)Aisha Abdel Gawad"Between Two Moons is a fearless and unflinchingly honest debut. With dangerous accuracy, Aisha Abdel Gawad depicts a particular kind of immigrant existence, that of an Egyptian family in New York struggling with myriad fault lines, both generational and experiential. The small details throughout this story - from the mechanics of prayer-time ablution to the subtleties of Egyptian-accented English - are spot-on. More than anything, Between Two Moons is a story about the place so many Arabs in this part of the world have been forced to inhabit in the post-911 age: that malicious, disorienting chasm between the hope of being seen and the fear of being watched." A History of Burning (2023)Janika Oza"A History of Burning is that rare epic that manages to retain both its sweep and its intimacy... This is a beautiful book, unflinching yet deeply engaged." The Book of Rain (2023)Thomas Wharton"It's difficult to describe just how audaciously imaginative The Book of Rain is. Thomas Wharton has crafted a world parallel to this one yet not, an epic of consuming scope. This is more than climate fiction for climate fiction's sake: with beautiful literary control, Wharton ventures into the wilds, and in doing so presents a stunning excavation of how fragile, fleeting and many-faced it is to be human. I wish more books surprised me as much as this one did." The Laughter (2023)Sonora Jha"The Laughter is a brilliant, dangerous novel. What Sonora Jha has done in this razorblade-tense story is create one of the most infuriating, compelling, and complex characters I've read in a long time, a man so at war with himself he threatens to come apart at the seams. Jha is an expert chronicler of the way civility and privilege can often mask such immense, ruinous rage, and what begins as a tale of a professor's infatuation with his colleague soon spirals into something far more sinister, a cascade of individual and institutional malice." Thistlefoot (2022)GennaRose Nethercott"It's an exquisite and rare literary skillset that can produce a book so epic and adventurous in scope, yet so poetic and intimate at the sentence level. Thistlefoot isn't just reimagined folklore--what GennaRose Nethercott has managed to do with this beautiful, haunting novel is capture so many of the disparate meanings of inheritance: the joy, heartbreak and ever-moving nature of things passed down through blood and time. This is a book to be lived in, a wild and stunning ride." Denial (2022)Jon Raymond"Denial is a short, sharp book, a subtle exploration of what justice means on the other side of human-driven climate calamity. Jon Raymond has created a scarily plausible future, and against this future considers one of the pivotal questions of our age--how to hold responsible those who, in the dizzying days before the worst of things, profited off the planet's destruction. There are no easy answers in this novel, only a deeply humane look at the chasm between crime and punishment, cause and consequence." The Island of Forgetting (2022)Jasmine Sealy"The Island of Forgetting is an engrossing saga of love, family and the undying past - gorgeous at the sentence level and sweeping in both depth and scope. Jasmine Sealy is one of the most exciting and powerful new voices in fiction, and with this stunning debut she has crafted a moving world of a book, polyphonic and sprinkled throughout with fire." Unity (2021)Elly Bangs"Unity is a wild firefight of a novel. But amidst the vivid dystopian worldbuilding--the undersea metropolises and scorched badlands--and all the breakneck action is something deeper, a philosophically and emotionally resonant exploration of what it means to carry multiplicities of ourselves, our myriad shades of being. Elly Bangs is a writer of both kaleidoscopic imagination and deep literary empathy, a cyberpunk star in the making." Hummingbird Salamander (2021)Jeff VanderMeer"A profound and incendiary thriller hurtling backward from the end of the world. Jeff VanderMeer’s tale of ecological and personal obsession inhabits that strange, surreal space where the natural world and human ambition collide – a space almost no other writer has chronicled with as much reverence and imaginative lucidity. The result is a detective story unlike any I’ve read before, futuristic in bearing but deeply relevant to this present, dangerous moment." The Captive (2021)Fiona King Foster"Fiona Foster has written a tension-wire novel, suspenseful from the first line to the last. A story about a fractured country quickly transforms into a study of the ways in which the darkest parts of our history follow us around like shadows. There is something gripping here, a nuanced dissection of how violence begets violence, damage begets damage." Noopiming (2020)Leanne Betasamosake Simpson"Noopiming is a rare parcel of beauty and power, at once a creator and destroyer of forms. All of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s myriad literary gifts shine here—her scalpel-sharp humor, her eye for the smallest human details, the prodigious scope of her imaginative and poetic generosity. The result is a book at once fierce, uproarious, heartbreaking, and, throughout and above all else, rooted in love." A Luminous Republic (2020)Andrés Barba"A Luminous Republic is a terrifying masterpiece. To lay bare with such stunning precision the nature of self-obsession – the viciousness with which any one of us might respond to that which we don’t understand – marks Andrés Barba as a writer of extraordinary talent. He has created a small, simple story and within it buried immense complexity and truth." An Ocean of Minutes (2018)Thea Lim"Amidst the breathtaking world Thea Lim has created in An Ocean of Minutes is a profound meditation on the inhumanity of class and the limits of love. It takes immense talent to render cruelty both accurately and with honest beauty - Lim has pulled it off. This is a story about the malleability of time, but at its core lives something timeless." Lost Empress (2018)Sergio de la Pava"Lost Empress is a vast galaxy of a book, a searing, frequently hilarious indictment of the absurdity of modern American life told through the lens of this country's two most violent pastimes-professional football and criminal justice. To spend time inside the unfiltered mind of a writer like Sergio de la Pava is a rare, dizzying treat." The Boat People (2018)Sharon Bala"The Boat People is a burning flare of a novel, at once incendiary and illuminating. With a rare combination of precision, empathy and insight, Sharon Bala has crafted an unflinching examination of what happens when the fundamental human need for safety collides with the cold calculus of bureaucracy. In the best tradition of fearless literature, it shatters our comfortable illusions about who we really are and reveals just how asymmetrical the privilege of belonging can be. This is a brilliant debut – a story that needs to be told, told beautifully." Anthologies containing stories by Omar El Akkad
Awards
| James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction Best Book nominee (2017) : American War | | Arthur C. Clarke Award Best Book nominee (2018) : American War |
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