This one ticked all the boxes for me! It's fiction but it reads like a memoir. Or maybe it reads like a book of essays. What ever it is, it is wonderful!

"I'm here because I was born and raised here. This is where I've lived my whole life. For better, for worse-and there's always been a bit of both-I don't want to be anywhere else. I've never even thought about it. America is my home."

Akhtar issues his account of experience as a American born Muslim. He explores his identity as he makes sense of Muslim customs. His ancestral roots come from Pakistan where Britain once ruled, where Osama bin Laden hid out, where marriages are arranged, and one’s name often came from the Quran. We are let in to his inner world where dreams are to be interpreted and his outer world where he enters a slippery slope of the stock trading world and it’s elite. Homeland elegy is, perhaps, a lament of his roots. A bit complex at times but worth the ride.

This book is one of Publishers Weekly’s top choices for 2020.

This was unsettling at times but very impactful. It is considered fiction but it felt like a memoir. I thought it was excellent.

A genre-defying work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pakistani American playwright that is part memoir, part autofiction, and part essay collection. Akhtar reflects on his American experience as the child of immigrants and his parents' experience and what it is to be a Muslim in America today. But it is also more than that. For example, there is a whole section on his father's last days as a doctor which is also great commentary on the American health care system. There are sections on life among the ultra-rich, Trump, and more.

Although written as a novel, this felt more like a series of connected essays. For me, that helped solidify the complexities of being a Muslim in America, and particular a Pakistani. It also helped illustrated how American foreign policy has failed in many ways. If I had to make a “required” reading list for understanding other cultures, this would head the list.