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Written in a lush, lyrical style, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment. The reading guide includes a number of recipes to share with friends and family!
An Arab-American novel as delicious as Like Water for Chocolate.
Praised by critics from The New Yorker to USA Today for her first novel, Arabian Jazz ("an oracular tale that unfurls like gossamer"), Diana Abu-Jaber weaves with spellbinding magic a multidimensional love story set in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles.
Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food—until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking. Falling in love brings Sirene's whole heart to a boil—stirring up memories of her parents and questions about her identity as an Arab American.
Written in a lush, lyrical style reminiscent of The God of Small Things, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, Crescent is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment.
Connie May Fowler
Lush, poignant, and searing ... unfolds with all the startling beauty of a hidden garden. Naomi Shihab Nye
Abu-Jaber is a high-spirited, magnificently graceful storyteller, a poet of deliciously fluted fiction, character, and culture. Sena Jeter Naslund
Abu-Jaber affirms the precious fragility of life, love, family, and the human community in meaningful ways. Sigrid Nunez
It is a story about how to cook and how to eat, and how to live in the new country. And, like all good novels, it is about how to tell a story. Whitney Otto
Romantic, whimsical and wonderful in every way, being both sensuous and smart. I want to hang out all day at Nadia's Cafe.
If you liked Crescent, try these:
by Fatima Farheen Mirza
Published 2019
The first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker's new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity and belonging.
by Isabel Vincent
Published 2017
A nonagenarian and a recently divorced reporter meet weekly for dinner, and the discussion ranges from the importance of beauty, to living after loss, to the power of love to redeem and renew, to how to make a succulent duck breast.
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
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