Montecore

At the start of this inventive novel, Abbas, a world-famous photographer and estranged father to a young novelist—also named Jonas Hassen Khemiri—is standing on a luxurious rooftop terrace in New York City. He is surrounded by rock stars, intellectuals, and political luminaries gathered to toast his fiftieth birthday. And yet how did Abbas, a dirt-poor Tunisian orphan and Swedish émigré, come to enjoy such success? Jonas is fresh off the publication of his first novel when answers to this question come in the form of an unexpected e-mail from Kadir, a lifelong friend of Abbas and an effervescent storyteller with delightfully anarchic linguistic idiosyncrasies. The portrait Kadir paints of Abbas—from a voluntarily mute boy who suffers constant night terrors, to a soulful young charmer, to a Swedish immigrant and political exile—proves to be vastly different from Jonas’s view of his father. As the two jagged versions reconcile in Kadir and Jonas’s impassioned correspondence, we’re given a portrayal of a man that is at once tender and feverishly imagined.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.