Waiting on Wednesday | #34

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly event that is hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine and spotlights upcoming releases that we are eagerly anticipating.

Refuge by Dina Nayeri 

It will be released on July 11th by Riverhead Books. 

Yes, I know it is already released yesterday but I found out about this book in a post by Pop Goes the Reader last week and I had to put it up for my Waiting on Wednesday post for this week. When I read the synopsis and I just knew it would be one book that I am planning on reading before the year’s over with. I wanted to have my Waiting on Wednesday posts to be mixed of Young Adult and Adult, as well as Middle Grade and New Adult. I just couldn’t find ones that are not Young Adult that grabbed my attention. Luckily, I found this book and I wanted to share. 

I love the cover! I love how the typography works well with the image. It isn’t stark white, it’s off white with yellow tones. It works well with the color of the cherries and the wood. I am curious about what representation of the cherries in this case. 

Finally, a moving immigrant story that looks at the larger contemporary refugee experience. 

An Iranian girl escapes to America as a child, but her father stays behind. Over twenty years, as she transforms from confused immigrant to overachieving Westerner to sophisticated European transplant, daughter and father know each other only from their visits: four crucial visits over two decades, each in a different international city. The longer they are apart, the more their lives diverge, but also the more each comes to need the other’s wisdom and, ultimately, rescue. 

Meanwhile, refugees of all nationalities are flowing into Europe under troubling conditions. Wanting to help, but also looking for a lost sense of home, our grown-up transplant finds herself quickly entranced by a world that is at once everything she has missed and nothing that she has ever known. Will her immersion in the lives of these new refugees allow her the grace to save her father? 

Refuge charts the deeply moving lifetime relationship between a father and a daughter, seen through the prism of global immigration. Beautifully written, full of insight, charm, and humor, the novel subtly exposes the parts of ourselves that get left behind in the wake of diaspora and ultimately asks: Must home always be a physical place, or can we find it in another person?