LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD • A BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 • Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan, "a moving look at family, survival, and celebration" (Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America).
"A gorgeously written and profoundly intimate debut." —Etaf Rum, author of New York Times bestseller A Woman Is No Man It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.
Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?
A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
AISHA ABDEL GAWAD has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the scholarly journal The Muslim World in a special issue on Anglophone Muslim women writers. She won a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story "Waking Luna." After graduating college, Aisha worked at the Arab American Association of New York, a community center and social services agency serving the immigrant community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She is currently a high school English teacher in Connecticut.
ISBN: 9780593467824 Format: Paperback Pages: 336 Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Published: May 07, 2024
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE SUMMER: Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar, Afar Magazine • Winner of the New York Society Library's Hornblower Award • Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
“Multifaceted and moving…We’ll see the world primarily through the eyes of Amira, the dutiful twin, the one who cares enough to look; we’ll witness post-9/11 Muslim lives under relentless scrutiny; we’ll measure time by sunset and sundown and the long stretches of hunger and thirst in between; and all of it will feel like a bruise, painful and tender and sometimes beautiful…Amira’s triumph at the close of this breathtaking, elegantly structured novel is in experiencing how fully and desperately human she can be.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Gawad honestly portrays the excitement and uncertainty of adolescence, set against a backdrop of racial tension that exploded in 9/11’s aftermath.”
