Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ayad is the author of American Dervish. As a playwright, he has written Junk; Disgraced; The Who & The What; and The Invisible Hand. Blending fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the post 9/11world, Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies (Little, Brown and Company) is a deeply personal work about identity and belonging. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. It’s a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation’s unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, and spares no one — least of all himself — in the process. Author Salman Rushdie called it “an unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable.”
Mini: Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, Ayad Akhtar’s novel Homeland Elegies, attempts to make sense of a post 9/11 country in which the gods of finance rule, debt has ruined countless lives, and immigrants live in fear.