Naeem Murr

And that sort of sets off, it seemed like the perfect way to initiate the story.

And also that the association itself is under such pressure because it's set during the 2000, 2007, 2008 housing crisis.

And that, of course, puts everyone under pressure of potentially losing their homes.

And there's another sort of resonance with the sort of Palestinian background as well.

I think about 2 million people lost their homes in America during that crisis.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think I never intended this to be a partisan book in any way.

You know, Jack's predicament is in some sense the predicament of every one of us.

Jack's predicament is how do you move forward?

You know, how do you, you know, given like the way I think about him is that, you know, he has a past too full of love to completely cauterize and too full of pain to completely assimilate.

Right.

So he's sort of trapped in that way between, you know, the past, the sort of traumatic past and the future, which is true of any would be true of any many Israelis as well and many Jews as well.

It would be true of, you know, it's true of Palestinians.

It's true of so many people.

And it's true of all of us, even if we haven't had a traumatic past.

You know, the future is always dictated in terms of how we categorize it, how we approach it emotionally by what we've experienced in the past.

So I think the way that fiction works is that you create a character who has a very specific and often very intense sort of predicament.

I mean, living in Gaza was no

joke for him and he suffered both at the hands of the Israelis and at the hands of his own people as well and you know right at the core of a book you know if you go into the subtext really the predicament of the character is all of our predicament that's what we connect to you know the way in which Jack

is desperately trying to find a way forward and sort of you know he he really can't he can't cohere which is why he's compartmentalizes his life why you know his life his career when he's a he's a flight assistant why people don't even know he's married the people he works with that he he just compartmentalizes his life entirely um and is this sort of fragmented man