Writing about Sirine the Chef was a very organic union of my own passions as an artist and a cook.Īs a woman, does Sirine intuitively know how to “carry her home within herself”? I supported myself in college as a short-order cook and seriously contemplated going into cooking professionally, but I eventually decided that it was more fun to write about food than to prepare it for a living. My father is a very serious chef and I grew up in a food-obsessed family, so naturally I inherited the obsession myself. What was your inspiration in defining Sirine through her relationship with food? Sirine is the essence of womanhood, her beauty and her nurturing nature. They also threw the best parties! I began to feel that it was critical to try and convey the intense beauty and legacy of Iraq, for people to be reminded that this was the proverbial “cradle of civilization.” I’d had absolutely no inkling that I’d be publishing Crescent at the very moment that America was heading back to war with Iraq. I was also guest-teaching at UCLA, a class in Middle Eastern literatures and cultures, a number of my students were Iraqi, and through them I discovered what a rich wealth of culture, food, and art Iraq has given to the world.

Several years had passed since the first Persian Gulf strife and I felt that we in America had never heard the Iraqis’ side of that story. How did you decide on this particular story?ĭiana Abu-Jaber: A few different things came together.

Gaines: I enjoyed your first novel, Arabian Jazz, but Crescent has an emotional maturity, a richness of nuance. Marie-Laure and Werner illuminate the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.Curled Up With a Good Book-An interview with Diana Abu-Jaber, author of *Crescent* In this magnificent, deeply moving novel, the stories of And a future which draws her ever closer to Werner, a German orphan, destined to labour in the mines until a broken radio fills his life with possibility and brings him to the notice of the Hitler Youth. The walled city by the sea, where father and daughter take refuge when the Nazis invade Paris. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home.

'Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.'įor Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. WINNER OF THE 2015 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONĪ beautiful, stunningly ambitious novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II

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