Every Exit Brings You Home

A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant's heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy from a Booker Prize longlisted author.

• focused on an airline steward, Jack -- he's a fascinating main character; he and and his wife are both immigrants from Gaza, and you see their tragic backstory from the 1980s in the first intifada -- they will really tap into your emotions and you see many sides of Jack -- he presents himself quite differently at home and at work
• book begins in 2008 in a condo complex of first generation Americans in Chicago
• you see a whole cast of characters with many, wide-ranging problems and they come together to show the human story in a poignant and sometimes comedic way
• PUBLICITY: pitch to national book clubs like Belletrist and similar; major national review coverage; literary outlets; excerpt in Paris Review or similar -- perhaps a section that relates to the war in Gaza; he could write an op ed, too;

"This is the best novel I've read in years, with everything a reader could want: complex characters, political wisdom, comedy, tragedy, soul. Naeem Murr has a particular gift for conveying the intimacies between characters, but his genius is for drawing his readers into the world of these intimacies and lives so vividly they won't want to leave it. " --Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss

"A rich and complex portrait of the immigrant experience that has at its center a heartbreaking and thrilling suspenseful story about tragic histories and new beginnings." --Jenny Offill, author of Weather

Naeem Murr is the author of three novels, including The Boy (a New York Times Notable Book) and The Perfect Man (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize). A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he's been awarded a regional Commonwealth Writers Prize, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Chicago.