Naeem Murr

And and this single prompt had sort of, you know, brought it to the crisis of birth in some sense that, you know, it was the thing that that allowed this novel to sort of deal with all of the things I had been thinking about in a completely integrated way in a condominium building where I live in Chicago.

But, you know, going back to Gaza and to the sort of traumatic experience of the main character.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing about a book like this is that you don't think about these things beforehand.

You know, what happens is that these characters just sort of come to life for you and sort of start facing you across the page.

But afterwards, when I look back

at the choices I made and look back at the condominium association, you can see it as a place where people in conflict have to share the same space.

So it seemed like the perfect sort of microcosm.

It's a little world, you know, we have someone from Haiti, we have someone from

Vietnam, we have someone who's sort of a second generation Latina, and we have Jack and Dimra.

And it's sort of a little world where they have to, as I say, have to share the same place.

It seemed like this perfect microcosm of, you know, to say that like the Palestinian Israeli situation, but sort of all internecine conflicts in some sense.

And of course, that's not something that I thought about when I was writing it.

I live in a condominium building and I know how hard it is for people to work together.

I know how hard it is to mediate conflicts, but it seemed like the perfect setting, especially that you have this sort of instigating element of somebody who comes into the building and is in the basement of the building.

I think that's important.

It's a very stratified.

There is a quality of stratification here that there are the above ground

units, and then there's a woman who moves into what she calls the garden apartment.

And so that is another element of it, that she feels that she's treated differently from the others.