Daughter, Son, Assassin: A Novel
with Steven Salaita
“Daughter, Son, Assassin is a brilliant debut novel from one of Palestine’s bravest and most trusted intellectuals.” —Susan Abulhawa, author of Against the Loveless World
Please join us Wednesday August 7th as we welcome renowned Palestine activist Steven Salaita to launch his first novel. Daughter, Son, Assassin is a story of family bonds amid political betrayal that explores the drastic steps that a young girl will take in order to find a sense of belonging.
Fred is lost, confused, almost certainly about to die. As he traces his steps back from the desert where he has been dropped by soldiers of a repressive Gulf Kingdom regime, his nine-year-old daughter, Nancy, is doing the same from six thousand miles away in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
With his disappearance, she and her mother are forced to leave their comfortable house in DC for a new life in Virginia. Abandoned by their friends and desperate for answers, Nancy and her mother must acclimate to the strange world of suburban anonymity. As Nancy grows into adulthood, she pieces together what happened to her father and devises a bold plan to avenge his disappearance.
Unraveling an international web of deceit in order to find her father will take time and patience; and becoming a cold-blooded assassin takes commitment to a life at odds with everything she knows.
“At times both sensitive and incendiary, Daughter, Son, Assassin is a meditation on parenting, friendship, the push and pull of diaspora over generations and the politics of conciliation to empire—in the form of a thriller. Steven Salaita’s debut novel is a fabulous and necessary read.”—Kareem Rabie, author of Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago
Steven Salaita is an award-winning scholar, writer, and activist. He is the author of ten books about Arab Americans, Indigenous peoples, race and ethnicity, and literature, most notably Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics, and An Honest Living. He currently teaches at the American University of Cairo. This is his first work of fiction. He tweets at @stevesalaita.