Virtual Event: Ayad Akhtar

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, playwright, and screenwriter AYAD AKHTAR for a discussion of his latest novel, Homeland Elegies. He will be joined in conversation by JOSHUA FERRIS, author of the acclaimed novel Then We Came to the End.

Contribute to Support Harvard Book Store

In lieu of our traditional ticketing at this time, we ask that you pay what you can to support our virtual event series and this indie bookstore. We recommend a $5 contribution, or you can support Harvard Book Store by purchasing a copy of Homeland Elegies  on harvard.com.

We are so excited to be able to continue bringing authors and their books to our community, particularly during such challenging times, and your patronage and enthusiasm are what make that possible.

About Homeland Elegies

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.

Praise for Homeland Elegies

"An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American writer, and, beyond that, an unsparing examination of both sides of that fraught hyphenated reality. Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie, author of Quichotte

"At the core of this flashing, kinetic coil of a story—part 1001 Nights, part Reality TV—is a passionate, wrenching portrayal of Americans exiled into 'otherness'." —Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan Beach and A Visit From the Goon Squad

"With Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar has found the perfect hybrid form for his exuberant, insightful, and wickedly entertaining epic about Muslim immigrants and their American-born children. A deeply moving father-and-son story unfolds against tumultuous current events in a book that anyone wanting to know how we as a nation got where we are today—and into what dark wood we might be heading tomorrow—should read." —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend