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by Ian Bassingthwaighte
From a hugely talented, award-winning young author, a brilliant, lively debut novel about an impulsive American attorney, a methodical Egyptian translator, and a disillusioned Iraqi-American resettlement officer trying to protect a refugee who finds herself trapped in Cairo during the turbulent aftermath of the January 25 revolution.
Cairo, 2011. President Mubarak has just been ousted from power. The oldest city in the world is reeling from political revolution, its consequent hopes and fears, its violence, triumphs, and defeats. But for the people actually living there, daily life has not slowed down but become wilder, more dangerous, and, occasionally, freeing.
Live from Cairo is the exuberant, dazzling story of these people: Dalia, a strong-willed Iraqi refugee who finds herself trapped in Egypt after her petition to resettle in America with her husband is denied. Charlie, her foolhardy attorney, whose frustration with the legal bureaucracy and complicated feelings for Dalia have led him to forge a not entirely legal plan to get her out. Aos, Charlie's fastidious translator and only friend, who spends his days trying to help people through the system and his nights in Tahrir Square protesting against it. And Hana, a young and disenchanted Iraqi-American resettlement officer; she is the worker assigned to Dalia's case, deciding whether to treat her plight as merely one more piece of paperwork, or as a full-blooded human crisis. As these individuals come together, a plot is formed to help Dalia. But soon laws are broken, friendships and marriages are tested, and lives are risked - all in an effort to protect one person from the dangerous sweep of an unjust world.
A vibrant portrait of a city in all its teeming chaos and glory, Live from Cairo is an exhilarating, electrifying debut, and a stunning testament to the unconquerable desire of people to rise above tragedy to seek love, friendship, humor, and joy.
"Starred Review. The ironies of bureaucracy and wartime, à la Catch-22, meet the ironies of love and sacrifice, à la The Necklace, profoundly humanizing the global refugee crisis. Bassingthwaighte's virtuoso debut deserves the widest attention." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Forthright, deeply relevant, and revelatory." - Library Journal
"The author paints a deep and empathetic picture of the inner struggles of his courageous, flawed characters, who in the midst of mortal danger and insurmountable odds, grapple with the most fundamental questions of right and wrong. The answers follow neither rules nor laws, making the climax to this novel breathtaking and heartrending." - Publishers Weekly
"It's a story of triumphant love and heartbreaking injustice, a story about how difficult the world makes it for any one person to do the right thing. Ian Bassingthwaighte has written an important and necessary book." - Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix
"A moving - and startlingly funny - novel about the global refugee crisis and all of the people caught up in a bureaucracy of human suffering. Bassingthwaighte finds the tragedy and absurdity in trying to be humane within an inhumane system. An ambitious debut from an exciting new voice." - Brit Bennett, New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers
"This ambitious and darkly comic novel captures, in its multiple perspectives, the tangled pains of a refugee crisis. Like Joseph Heller and Adam Johnson, Bassingthwaighte brilliantly illuminates the absurdity of a tragic situation." - Andrea Barrett, National Book Award-winning author of Archangel and Servants of the Map
"Ian Bassingthwaite's Live From Cairo is, as the title suggests, a living, animate, remarkable novel written with an energy rarely found in debut novels. With its sweeping eye for sizzling detail, this portrait of wanderers from different lands in a troubled Middle East is urgent and fiercely engaging." - Chigozie Obioma, Booker Shortlisted author of The Fishermen
"My favorite thing about this book is the focus on love - love for country, for self, for mothers, for brothers, for each other. That at the heart of this novel is the deep, aching love between an Arab woman and an Arab man gives me goosebumps. We need this book. We need it on every shelf." - Randa Jarrar, Arab-American Book Award-winning author of A Map of Home
This information about Live from Cairo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ian Bassingthwaigthe was a Fulbright Grantee in Egypt in 2009, where he worked in a legal aid office that served refugees from Iraq, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa. He has been honored with Hopwood Awards for both novel writing and short fiction. He was also named as a finalist for the Daniel Pearl Investigative Journalism Initiative. His work has appeared in Esquire, National Geographic, the Chicago Tribune, The Sun, Tin House, The Rumpus, and many other publications. Live from Cairo is his first novel.
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