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Riverhead Books
January 2017
On Sale: January 17, 2017
304 pages
ISBN: 1594633584
EAN: 9781594633584
Hardcover
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Romance Suspense
A mesmerizing debut set in Syria on the cusp of the unrest, A
Word for Love is the spare and exquisitely told story of a
young American woman transformed by language, risk, war, and
a startling new understanding of love.
It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love. Bea,
an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search
of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country
known to hold the "The Astonishing Text," an ancient,
original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is
said to move its best readers to tears. But once in this
foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading
Arabic she is entwined in her host family's complicated
lives--as they lock the doors, and whisper anxiously about
impending revolution. And suddenly, instead of the ancient
love story she sought, it is her daily witness of a
contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance--between a
housemaid and policeman of different cultural and political
backgrounds--that astonishes her, changes her, and makes her
weep. But as the country drifts toward explosive unrest, Bea
wonders how many secrets she can keep, and how long she can
fight for a romance that does not belong to her. Ultimately,
in a striking twist, Bea's own story begins to mirror that of
"The Astonishing Text" that drew her there in the first
place--not in the role of one of the lovers, as she might
once have imagined, but as the character who lives to tell
the story long after the lovers have gone. With melodic meditation on culture, language, and familial
devotion. Robbins delivers a powerful novel that questions
what it means to love from afar, to be an outsider within a
love story, and to take someone else's passion and cradle it
until it becomes your own.
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