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Award-winning, New York Times Notable author of A Replacement Life - "a born storyteller with a tremendous gift for language" (San Francisco Chronicle) - delivers a fierce and staggering new page-turner full of cruelty, tenderness, and heroism, about a young girl and her parents fleeing civil war and the brutal dictatorship that has targeted their family.
Susanna, George, and their eight-year-old daughter, Dina, have been lucky, so far, in these four years since war broke out in their country. Even as their fellow "minority-sect" neighbors and classmates are murdered or imprisoned, George's loyal work teaching "dominant-sect" literature has kept them fed and protected. But then the day comes: the university fires George—despite his years of collaboration, he is no longer safe. Left without money or allies, it is time for the family to run.
Embarking on a harrowing trip through refugee camps and across the sea, both George and Susanna are forced in their own ways to make sacrifices to keep Dina safe, while Dina fights to understand the chaotic world crashing down around her. But with each member of the family struggling to survive in circumstances beyond their control, lies and betrayals multiply until it seems impossible for any of them to reach across the abyss. The Unwanted is a stunning story of what the most powerless among us will do for dignity and safety.
"[A] rousing near-future saga…Fishman's worldbuilding is impeccable…He skillfully ramps up the tension…Fans of dystopian classics like 1984 will find much to savor in Fishman's spellbinding tale." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Fishman effectively captures the fear, malaise, and desperation that comes with others' control of our movements…an informed, earnest…tale of escape." —Kirkus Reviews
"Breathtakingly propulsive, sweeping in scope, and astoundingly timely, The Unwanted depicts the before, during, and after of a refugee family's terrifying flight from an unnamed war-torn region. With profound tenderness, the novel depicts its heroine's hard-fought triumph over brutality in a world teeming with broken people, nations, and promises." —Ada Calhoun, New York Times bestselling author of Why We Can't Sleep
"The Unwanted is Boris Fishman's best book yet—one of the best books I've read in years, in fact. But don't call it an allegory. It's entirely too convincing, too human, and too humane for that. In telling the story of a family pushed to the brink by events and perceptions they can do nothing to alter, Fishman has delivered something truly sophisticated—sophisticated artistically but also morally. A harrowing novel for equally harrowing times." —Tom Bissell, bestselling author of Creative Types
"Urgently contemporary and prescient in equal measure, Fishman's The Unwanted channels the spectrum of literature's finest, emotionally visceral dystopian masterworks, from Dune to The Handmaid's Tale, in a fable of survival, resistance and, ultimately, maternal love." —Lea Carpenter, author of Ilium
This information about The Unwanted 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.
Photo: Rob Ligouri
Boris Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and emigrated to the United States in 1988. He is the author of the novels A Replacement Life (which won the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal) and Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo, both New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Savage Feast, a family memoir told through recipes. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, New York magazine, and many other publications. He has taught at Princeton University and the University of Montana, and now teaches at The University of Austin.
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