Synopses & Reviews
A
New York Times Bestseller
A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick
A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse’s Best Book of the Year • A Best Women’s Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A POPSUGAR Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • One of Washington Post’s 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • One of Refinery 29’s Best Books of the Month • One of Buzzfeed News’s 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • One of New Arab’s Best Books by Arab Authors • One of Electric Lit’s 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • One of The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of 2019
“Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” Refinery 29
In her debut novel Etaf Rum tells the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community — a story of culture and honor, secrets and betrayals, love and violence. Set in an America at once foreign to many and staggeringly close at hand, A Woman Is No Man is an intimate glimpse into a controlling and closed cultural world, and a universal tale about family and the ways silence and shame can destroy those we have sworn to protect.
"Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of — dangerous, the ultimate shame.”
Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children — four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.
Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man.
But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family — knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.
Review
“A blistering exploration of three generations of Palestinian-American women, unfolding in lyrical but demanding prose.” David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
Review
“This is a novel you devour in a few precious sittings, that you press into the hands of friends and family, that lingers in your heart and mind long after the last page.” Tara Conklin, author of The Last Romantics
Review
“A Woman Is No Man complicates and deepens the Arab American story — a tale as rich and varied as America itself.” Diana Abu-Jaber, Washington Post
About the Author
Etaf Rum was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by Palestinian immigrants. She lives in North Carolina with her two children. Rum also runs the Instagram account @booksandbeans. A Woman Is No Man is her first novel.