Every Exit Brings You Home

A moving and haunting portrait of a Palestinian immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.

In Chicago in 2007, as the sub-prime mortgage crisis looms, Jamal ‘Jack’ Shaban is trying to save his neighbours’ debt-ridden homes.

At work, his flight attendant colleagues assume he’s gay, as he hides his desire for his closest friend, a Midwestern stewardess. At home, Jack and his traditional Muslim wife, Dimra, are desperate to have a child to heal the wounds of a traumatic past in 1980s Palestine.

When an angry single mother moves into their building, those wounds come again to the surface, revealing the scandalous desires that first forced Jack and Dimra into exile . . .

Liar, adulterer, devoted husband, community leader, saint, sinner, survivor: Jack’s contradictions are at the heart of Murr’s rich and extraordinary novel. With its portrayal of blasted hopes and indomitable commitment to new beginnings, Every Exit Brings You Home is a necessary novel for our times, in which the conflicts, joys, griefs and passions of a diverse group of immigrant homeowners come to represent the wounded world we all must share.

‘Timely and urgent, Every Exit Brings You Home explores Jack’s hopes, sorrows, and regrets―and, by proxy, those of immigrants everywhere.’ Harper’s Bazaar

‘This is one of those rare stories that feels at once universal and impossibly strange, rooted in the ordinary challenges of the American Dream but lashed to horrors unfolding on the other side of the planet.’ Washington Post