💡 “Man kharag min daro, ‘al me’daro.” In Egyptian-American author Rajia Hassib’s debut novel, In the Language of Miracles, this Egyptian saying is translated into: “whoever leaves his house loses prominence.” While an apt and accurate translation, the English iteration of the proverb fails to deliver the impact and sense of loss felt in Arabic, begging the question: What gets lost in translation when you’re far from home? In her 2015 novel, Hassib dissects just that.

The Egyptian Menshawy family has long sought the American dream, only to suffer its nightmare. Recently wed with a newborn, Samir and Nagla move to the US to pursue careers as doctors. While the relocation is off to a rough start that tests their relationship, the waves soon subside, only for everything to come crashing down decades later. As their children grow older and begin developing identities of their own, a crisis leaves the family unmoored and under intense scrutiny from their new-found community: their eldest son, Hossam, is found dead alongside his girlfriend, Natalie, and the Menshawys are to blame.

Oscillating between the different members of the family, the novel is narrated a year after Hossam’s death, tracing the days following the incident. Hassib eloquently anatomizes the psyches of each of the surviving family members: Samir, Nagla, their surviving son Khaled, and his grandmother Ehsan, who refuses to part with her Egyptian ways. We see a mother unspooled following her son’s death, a father desperately trying to prove he “belongs,” a brother seeking to escape his family’s shadow, and a stalwart Egyptian grandmother observing it all with a masked, heavy heart.

This is a novel the pages of which were stained with our tears. Hassib’s prose carries within it a palpable grief that tugs at the reader’s heartstrings. In the Language of Miracles explores guilt, mental illness, what it means to never belong, and the pain of being lost in translation — a point Hassib emphasizes in the beginning of each chapter, introduced with an Arabic proverb and its nearest English equivalent that never quite conveys the right meaning.

In the Language of Miracles feels familiar, its characters reminiscent of people we know and love. This is why the novel proves a difficult read. By meticulously probing the innermost privacies of these familiar people, Hassib leaves the reader with a heavy heart, forcing one to spend much time introspecting and questioning all that we had once assumed was inherent to our identities. In the Language of Miracles is a story of grief and loss, yes, but it is also a story of love, and how the ways it manifests may not always make sense to others.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can find the ebook on Amazon and Kobo. You can also place a special order for the paperback version at The Bookspot.

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