Naeem Murr

I'm not even remotely alone.

Yeah.

You know, I do think for me, almost all fiction for me is about two things.

It's about intimacy and it's about truth.

That's what all of my books are focused on, on relationships as they develop.

It's all about trying to connect to other people all the way through and that some truth slowly, slowly, slowly surfacing through the material of the book.

I think for me a book is a kind of relationship.

You know, one of the things that I noticed when I would go to sort of reading groups is that, you know, why they connect to some books and don't connect to others is because some books really offer a kind of relationship, right?

You enter all of those lives.

I think

that, you know, this book has a lot of sort of fundamental sort of mythic themes.

I think one of the elements that's there all the way throughout is corrupted Edens.

There are all these lovers, you know, so Georges and his lover Farida.

and jack and his cousin and then there's another relationship as well where you have these couples who are it's a sort of strange edenic world like for example with jack and his cousin they meet in a half-destroyed house you know in this white room that looks out upon the sea this is in gaza and all around them there is chaos and there is horror right and with another couple this

Lebanese man, George, and his lover, Farida.

She is Palestinian.

He is a Maronite.

They should not be together.

And they, too, become lovers during the context of the Lebanese Civil War.

Again, you have this image of lovers of a kind of Edenic, an Adam and Eve at the center.