REFUGE

Finally, an immigrant story that looks at the larger, contemporary refugee experience! Dina Nayeri's new novel is afresh take on the immigrant-refugee story: a novel about a flawed but endearing Iranian father, the Westernized daughter who has grown up without him, and the many ways they both seek and find refuge.

Niloo Hamidi left Iran for the U.S. when she was a small child. Her father stayed behind. Now an adult, Niloo has her father's laugh and appetite for joy, but also a Western education and an immigrant's insecurities.

Over the course of twenty years, father and daughter meet only four times-- each visit in a different international city-- and they struggle to understand each other. Meanwhile, in thebackground of these visits, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe, creating a very different contemporary scene from Niloo's childhood beginnings in the US. Living now in Amsterdam with her European husband, she has a close-up view of the lives of these new Iranian refugees, and their suffering becomes personal.

REFUGE charts the lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, while examining in depth the nuances of global immigration-- the hardships of leaving one's homeland, the parts of ourselves we leave behind in the wake of diaspora,and of course, our roots. Beautifully written, subtle, and insightful, the novel wonders: must home always be a physical place, or can we find it in another person? Fraught and intense as any family history, Dina Nayeri delivers a gorgeous novel that delves unflinchingly into the universal desire for belonging.

Dina Nayeri is the author of A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, which was translated into fourteen foreign languages. A graduate of Princeton, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, the O. Henry Prize and fellowships from the McDowell Colony,Bogliasco Foundation, and several other artist residencies. Her stories and essays have been published byGranta, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vice, Guernica, Electric Literature, The Southern Review, Marie Claireand elsewhere.