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In what is perhaps her richest and most deeply searching novel...a story about what it is to be an American, and about Maryam Yazdan, who after 35 years in this country must finally come to terms with her "outsiderness."
Knopf
May 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0307263940
Hardcover
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Fiction
Two families, who would otherwise never have come together,
meet by chance at the Baltimore airport—the Donaldsons, a
very American couple, and the Yazdans, Maryam’s fully
assimilated son and his attractive Iranian American wife.
Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an adopted infant
daughter from Korea. After the babies from distant Asia are
delivered, Bitsy Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans
to celebrate with an “arrival party,†an event that is
repeated every year as the two families become more deeply
intertwined. Even independent-minded Maryam is drawn in. But only up to a
point. When she finds herself being courted by one of the
Donaldson clan, a good-hearted man of her vintage, recently
widowed and still recovering from his wife’s death, suddenly
all the values she cherishes—her traditions, her privacy,
her otherness—are threatened. Somehow this big American
takes up so much space that the orderly boundaries of her
life feel invaded. A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender
observations that cast a penetrating light on the American
way as seen from two perspectives, those who are born here
and those who are still struggling to fit in.
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