In The Wrong End of the Telescope--a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year and winner of the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction--Rabih Alameddine, the celebrated Lebanese American author of The Angel of History and An Unnecessary Woman, trains a curious lens on the Syrian refugee crisis through the volunteerism of Dr. Mina Simpson, a trans woman from the States, "American of Lebanese and Syrian origin." She arrives on the island of Lesbos, "as close as [she'd] been to Lebanon in decades," at the behest of her friend Emma, whose NGO needs someone with Mina's skills. Moved by a compassion deeper than that of the average disaster tourist, Mina makes herself useful by attending to Sumaiya, a refugee who is resolute in her desire to protect her family, as she attempts to conceal a terminal illness.
But this arresting novel has many more secrets to reveal. "The island seemed to be casting remembrance spells," Mina says in one of numerous ruminative chapters about her life leading up to this trip. "I was going in circles with my memories as if I were trying to unspool some curse." Her efforts to help a family that reminds her of her own--all but her brother estranged to her--exhumes a complex network of unresolved tension. This she confesses to an unspecified "you, the writer," who already failed to craft a novel about Syrian refugees, and whose identity is heavily inflected with many of Rabih's own attributes: "Fancy, idiosyncratic glasses teetered on the tip of your nose."
With enormous generosity and knowing humor ("don't f**king call it A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos, just don't"), The Wrong End of the Telescope is an unequivocal masterpiece. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness