A Woman Is No Man: A Novel (English Edition)

Three generations of Palestinian-American women in contemporary Brooklyn are torn between individual desire and the strict mores of traditional Arab culture in this powerful, heartbreaking and hopeful debut novel—an emotionally resonant and culturally relevant story of love, secrets, courage, and duty that speaks to the lives and experiences of all women today, giving voice to the silenced and agency to the oppressed.

“Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of, dangerous, the ultimate shame.”

Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a house thousands of miles from the only place she has ever known. Fearful and uncertain of her strange new husband, Isra struggles with her duties as a traditional wife and the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda—pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children, four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear.

Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s behest, though her only desire is to attend college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options might have been different had her parents survived a fatal car crash that left her and her sisters orphans in their grandparents’ care and if she was free of Fareeda’s fierce attempts to protect her granddaughters from a world she has decided is unfit for them.

But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

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