Country of Origin

by Dalia Azim

Overview

Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government—but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation's coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646051526
Publisher:	Strange Object
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Dalia Azim’s work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Aperture, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Glimmer Train (where she received their Short Story Award for New Writers), Other Voices, Alcalde, and Sightlines, among other places. She lives in Austin, TX, where she is the manager of special projects at the Blanton Museum of Art. Previously she worked as a researcher at the Dedalus Foundation and as a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. She graduated with a dual degree in art and literature from Stanford Universityand grew up in Canada and Colorado.

Editorial Reviews

02/28/2022

Azim’s evocative debut opens with Egypt on the brink of revolution in 1952, as seen through the eyes of an Egyptian girl. Halah Ibrahim’s father, Mansoor, is a general consumed with politics, and while he chases power and influence, Halah is pulled from school and left at home with her mother and their housemaid, Reema. General Ibrahim’s clandestine gatherings with members of a military faction are Halah’s sole exposure to the outside world. When Halah chafes at the prospect of an arranged marriage at 17, she runs away with Khalil Seif, a soldier who has landed a scholarship in America. This irreparably damages her relationship with her family, and Halah later wonders if it prompted her father to arrest and imprison Khalil’s brother, Hassan. In 1955, Halah has a daughter, Amena, and tries to make amends with her father. But during a visit to Egypt a couple years later, Halah goes missing and never returns. Her family is left to discover what became of her, and the novel diverges into Khalil, Hassan, and Amena’s perspectives, allowing Azim to gradually reveal hidden layers of the story, enriching her characters and illuminating the heart of a country and people. The result is insightful and nuanced. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Azim’s evocative debut...gradually reveal[s] hidden layers of the story, enriching her characters and illuminating the heart of a country and people. The result is insightful and nuanced." —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Country of Origin is a rich, character-driven novel about personhood, enduring love, and immense grief." —FOREWORD REVIEWS, starred review

“Lyrical, piercing, and powerful.” —LARA PRESCOTT

"Dalia Azim’s luminous Country of Origin is a complex and moving portrait of a family reshaped by a young woman’s determination to change the course of her life. Tender and wise, this novel explores the steep costs of loyalty, betrayal, and revolution—and the tenacity of love. A transporting debut." —KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE, author of The Five Wounds

"Evocative and moving, Country of Origin shows the struggles of two families caught up in the tumult of recent history. Love, loss, betrayal, migration, all of these are deftly explored in this fine first novel. Dalia Azim has given us a true and powerful story of the ties that bind and the ties that break, and our endless negotiation between the two." —BEN FOUNTAIN, author of Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution

“I picked this book up, not expecting the mystery, courage, and riveting adventure I would find in its pages. I put it down three days later, changed as the best books change you: stronger, and of wider, wilder vision. Among the best novels I’ve read in years.” —DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Barn 8

“A novel of immense power, Country of Origin is an intergenerational epic that explores how one family’s secrets and traumas interweave with political and social upheavals in transformative ways. In any year, Dalia Azim’s gripping, lyrical debut would be an event. In this moment, it is essential. This book is a revelation.”

—MARY HELEN SPECHT, author of Migratory Animals

“Breathtaking and memorable, Country of Origin is the kind of brilliant novel that breaks you open and puts you back together by the last page.” 

—S. KIRK WALSH, author of The Elephant of Belfast

“A buoyant debut which leaps in brilliant arcs, Dalia Azim’s Country of Origin carries the reader across history, over vast geographies, and always lands solidly in character. It is a narrative that runs on compassion, inviting us to care not just about the words, but about the world. I can still taste the food, feel the heat of the flames, and hear the call to prayer.”

—KIRK LYNN, author of Rules for Werewolves

From the Publisher

2022-01-12
An upper-class Egyptian teenager pursues romance and personal freedom following the 1952 uprising.

Halah Ibrahim is 14 when Cairo goes up in flames. She watches it burn from the relative safety of her family’s lavish home, guarded by the privilege of her father’s military connections. As the family cook says, “The rich are always protected.” Halah’s schooling ends with the revolution and her parents’ attempt to arrange her marriage to a much older man. Halah rebels, sneaking off in the night to marry Khalil, one of her father’s military acquaintances, whom she barely knows. They travel to New York, where he’ll attend medical school. “I had been so blasé about money my whole life,” Halah says, not realizing the gravity of what she’s done or the harshness of the existence that awaits her until she and Khalil try to forge a life together in Queens. They have a daughter, Amena, and Halah falls into patterns of negative, obsessive thought. Early descriptions of Halah’s behavior seem like wild teenage defiance, but this is reframed after Halah goes missing in 1967 and other characters—Khalil, college-age Amena, and Khalil’s imprisoned brother, Hassan—begin to tell their sides of her story from various points in the future. Halah “hadn’t been in her right mind before she vanished,” and as the other characters try to piece together what happened, her earlier obsessions and actions seem less like immaturity. As they reckon with Halah’s disappearance, the other three characters’ stories reach out into diverse futures where they each come to terms with Halah’s influence and their connections to their Egyptian past.

Interesting for what it says about youth and romance entangling with mental illness.

Kirkus Reviews