Wrong End of the Telescope

"The Wrong End of the Telescope" is a novel by Rabih Alameddine that was awarded the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It follows the story of Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor who arrives at the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, to help her friend who runs an NGO there. When a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer, a deep connection sparks between the two women. The novel explores the circumstances of the migrants' displacement and the constraints of helping them, while also weaving in stories of other refugees. It is a beautiful, well-paced, enraging, funny, and heartbreaking book that has been described as a "bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing this humanitarian crisis."

\n Format: Hardback
\n Length: 368 pages
\n Publication date: 02 September 2021
\n Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
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Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction




A beautiful, well-paced, enraging, funny, and heartbreaking book, according to The Guardian. Favorite novel of the year? Tough choice for me, but maybe The Wrong End of the Telescope, which was devastating and wondrous. Nobody writes like Rabih. Nobody gets anywhere close. John Green (#1 bestselling author) via Twitter. Spectacular. . . Alameddine's irreverent prose evokes the old master storytellers from my own Middle Eastern home. . . deeply poignant, New York Times. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses, bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the T. . . . is a triumph of empathy and compassion, reminding us of the power of human connection in the face of unimaginable adversity.

\n Weight: 588g\n
Dimension: 162 x 242 x 35 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781472156112\n \n