This is a pretty harrowing book, although not entirely. It’s not a misery slog or anything like that, but it is deeply affecting and sad, and certainly is about very sad things. The novel begins at a family get together near Boston. We meet a blended American family of Irish Catholic and Lebanese Catholics getting together for a celebration. One of our main characters, Rita, is a journalist from DC bringing her Jewish boyfriend to meet the family. As we circulate around, we meet some of the primary character we’ll be spending time with throughout the novel. In the last moments of the opening chapter Rita sees a man walking to the middle of the crowd she doesn’t recognize. What she does recognize, especially from her time reporting in Iraq, is that he is carrying a gun.
From there, the novel jumps back more than a hundred years as we meet the great-grandparents of both sides of this family in the meeting places. We move up in time to close to the present day, only spending a chapter or so with each generation (this is not a giant family epic per se). We also meet Nabil, a young Iraqi man living in Baghdad, who will also be an important figure in our book when he is a translator and guide for Rita in her war days.
Lastly, we of course arrive back at the beginning where we began.
It’s a sad and deeply affecting, and it’s a sweet and tender look at love, family, and American life in its many forms. It’s also a sad indictment of the last twenty years and a good reminder that all our troubles hardly began in 2016, as much as we often feel that way today.