Nada Awar Jarrar's latest novel is
An Unsafe Haven. One of her ten favorite books about exile, as shared at the
Guardian:
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The possibility that one can feel doubly exiled is at the centre of this novel. Ifemelu is an educated young woman who moves from her native Nigeria to the US, where she discovers that race continues to influence social status and compromise one’s rights as a citizen. Not news to most of us, perhaps, but while Adichie’s message is undoubtedly political, it is her focus on Ifemelu’s day-to-day life in exile that makes this novel so compelling. At a dinner party in New York, Ifemelu tells a group of liberal intellectuals that her race had never been an issue in Nigeria, concluding: “I only became black when I came to this country.”
Read about
the other books on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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