Excerpt from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The strips were sent to Mount Sinai Hospital, in New York, where a cardiologist on staff referred them to my father, in Milwaukee. Considered the leading specialist in Brugada in the States, second in the world only to the Brugada brothers, who had identified the syndrome at their labs in Belgium, Father was accustomed to EKG strips and patients pouring into his lab from across the country—and, later, from the Far East. Indeed, Trump wasn't even the first person of some fame whose case had come his way. The year prior, Father was flown first class to Brunei, where he examined the sultan himself in a lab that had been outfitted to Father's specs by the time he'd touched down in Bandar Seri Begawan. Though Trump was no monarch—at least not yet—he wasn't about to get on a plane for Milwaukee, either. So Father was flown—again, first class—to Newark, where Trump's helicopter was waiting for him. He flew into a heliport along the Hudson River, where a car picked him up and drove him to Mount Sinai. Ushered into one of the exam rooms, where the equipment was set up for a battery of tests—the usual twelve-lead EKG, followed by a stress test, and if neither induced the Brugada arrhythmia, there was an option to inject an alkaloid through an intravenous line—Father waited for his patient to arrive. But Trump never showed.

That night, in the room at the Plaza Hotel that had been arranged for him, Father's bedside phone rang just as he was falling asleep. It was Donald himself. What follows is my approximation of their conversation, shaped by Father's recollection of, above all, the man's solicitousness:

"No one seems to know how to say it, Doctor."

"Nothing new there."

"How do you say it?"

"Ak-tar."

"So Ak, like in Oc-topus."

"That works."

"But is that how you say it? Where you're from?—Where are you from?"

"Pakistan."

"Pakistan—"

"And we pronounce the name differently there."

"I'm talented. I can say it right."

"So we say Akhtar." Father reverted to the native kh

Excerpted from Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Copyright © 2020 by Ayad Akhtar. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.