Refuge

May 1, 2017
A daughter and father seek strength and solace across international and emotional divides in Nayeri’s novel, rooted in the Arab Spring uprisings and the European migrant crisis. Niloofar Hamidi and her father, Bahman, have seen each other four times since she and her mother fled Iran in 1987. In years as a refugee followed by cultural isolation in her youth, Niloo insulates herself from her family’s foibles and failings. Her independence leaves her empty, adrift in Amsterdam and losing touch with her family and heritage. In contrast, Bahman spends years in Iran seeking out shelter between doomed-to-fail relationships and an opium addiction that renders him increasingly toxic and dependent. Niloo’s new friendship with Persian asylum-seekers and Iran’s political crises of the early millennium crack the delicate stasis of their lives. Niloo must decide if the sense of commonality and empathy she shares with her refugee friends can extend to her father. Nayeri’s prose sings while moving nimbly with equal parts seriousness and humor. And by the bittersweet conclusion, readers may find themselves longing for the strength to say that they, too, “tore something precious from the clenched fist of the universe.” Agent: Kathleen Anderson, Anderson Literary.

May 1, 2017
An expatriate Iranian woman struggles to reconcile her European life with her background.Niloo is 8 when she flees with her mother and brother from their native Iran. Bahman, her father, stays behind; he has a life, and a dental practice, that he can't or won't uproot. He's also addicted to opium. Over the next 20 years, Niloo sees her father four times. Each time, it is difficult to connect. Bahman finds his daughter humorless and foreign. Niloo blames her father for staying behind, for abandoning his family, for his addiction. She's embarrassed by his village mannerisms. By now, Niloo has developed a successful academic career, married a Frenchman, moved to Amsterdam; she's become sophisticated, cosmopolitan. But soon she finds and befriends a community of Iranian refugees in the cold Dutch city, most of them struggling for legal documentation. At the same time that she is embarrassed by her father, she grows alienated from her European husband. Nayeri's (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, 2013) second novel is richly imagined and frequently moving in its descriptions of the neither-here-nor-there immigrant's life. No matter what she does, Niloo can't seem to feel at home. In the meantime, the news from Iran grows worse, as Ahmadinejad takes power and protests break out. Nayeri manages these various threads--the personal, the political, the cultural, the generational--deftly, and the result is poignant, wise, and often funny. But not all the characters are equally drawn, and Niloo's brother and mother get the short shrift: though they make various appearances in the narrative, they never come together as full-fledged characters. Likewise, Guillaume, Niloo's French husband, seems more typecast than individually imagined. Still, we come to empathize deeply with Niloo and her father as well as with the refugees Niloo meets in Amsterdam. A vital, timely novel about what it means to seek refuge.

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May 15, 2017
Niloo's childhood is uprooted when she, her mother, and brother are forced to flee Iran to seek asylum in America. Staying behind is Niloo's father, Bahman, who promises they will reunite. Yet 22 years pass, and Bahman remains in Iran, seeing his daughter only a handful of times. Niloo's memories of these visits reveal a complicated relationship between her and her father, further compounded by his opium addiction, and her recollections become entwined with their current lives. Niloo, now married and living in Amsterdam, has few personal connections with others until she discovers a Persian arts space, where she forges a bond with a group of exiles and activists. As Niloo becomes more involved with the refugees' plights, she finds herself struggling with her own self-identity. Meanwhile, the gregarious Bahman is placed under house arrest, forcing him to confront his demons. Set against landscapes of political unrest, Nayeri's (A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, 2013) novel of a daughter and father seeking to reconcile their long-distance perceptions of family offers a captivating, multilayered exploration of lives caught between worlds.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2017

After A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, Nayeri again plunges us into the riptide experience of immigration today. Now a cultured and classy Westerner, Niloo left Iran as a child but misses the obstreperous father she's seen only four times in two decades. Absorbed in the plight of the refugees flooding Europe, Niloo longs to reconnect with both her father and with a familiar homeland she barely knows.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2017

As antiimmigration sentiment stirs throughout the West, it's easy to forget the trauma experienced by those forced to leave their homelands fleeing war, famine, or religious persecution. Nayeri's new novel, after A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, is a poignant reflection on the plight of refugees from the perspective of Niloo Hamadi, who arrived in the United States from Iran as an impressionable eight-year-old. Raised in Oklahoma with her brother Kian, educated at the best American schools, now married to Guillaume and pursuing a career in anthropology in Amsterdam, Niloo could be a poster child for the ideal emigre experience. A tightly controlled overachiever, she has little sympathy for her Rumi-quoting, hashish-smoking father, who stayed behind in Isfahan. During their few reunions, she is embarrassed by his excesses and neediness while subconsciously harboring a yearning for the love and generosity of spirit they once shared. Longing to recapture her Iranian identity, Niloo befriends a community of alienated asylum seekers, causing her to reevaluate her life choices. VERDICT Nayari uses gentle humor and evocative prose to illuminate the power of familial bonds and to bestow individuality on those anonymous people caught between love of country and need for refuge. A beautiful addition to the burgeoning literature of exile. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2017

As antiimmigration sentiment stirs throughout the West, it's easy to forget the trauma experienced by those forced to leave their homelands fleeing war, famine, or religious persecution. Nayeri's new novel, after A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, is a poignant reflection on the plight of refugees from the perspective of Niloo Hamadi, who arrived in the United States from Iran as an impressionable eight-year-old. Raised in Oklahoma with her brother Kian, educated at the best American schools, now married to Guillaume and pursuing a career in anthropology in Amsterdam, Niloo could be a poster child for the ideal emigre experience. A tightly controlled overachiever, she has little sympathy for her Rumi-quoting, hashish-smoking father, who stayed behind in Isfahan. During their few reunions, she is embarrassed by his excesses and neediness while subconsciously harboring a yearning for the love and generosity of spirit they once shared. Longing to recapture her Iranian identity, Niloo befriends a community of alienated asylum seekers, causing her to reevaluate her life choices. VERDICT Nayari uses gentle humor and evocative prose to illuminate the power of familial bonds and to bestow individuality on those anonymous people caught between love of country and need for refuge. A beautiful addition to the burgeoning literature of exile. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]--Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.