WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island.

Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them.

Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

• We started tracking this book on July 10, 2021.
• This book was $12.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 41 times in the past 1,513 days.
• The current price of this book is $6.77 last checked 2 days ago.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is $6.74.
• The lowest price to date was $6.74 last reached on June 17, 2025.
• This book has been $6.74 one time since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was $21.94 last reached on September 25, 2021.
• This book has been $21.94 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionGenre FictionFamily LifeSiblings
• Literature & FictionGenre FictionDisaster
• Literature & FictionGenre FictionComing of Age

• Publication Date: September 18, 2021
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 321 Pages
• File Size: 12 KB