Every Exit Brings You Home

Forthcoming from W. W. Norton, February 2026

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The Washington Post, Ron Charles

‘Every Exit Brings You Home’ is a Work of Magic

For too long, Naeem Murr’s name has been whispered among judging panels instead of toasted in book clubs. Since his 1998 debut, “The Boy,” he has received the kind of critical accolades that confer honor but not sales. His latest novel, with the poetic if enigmatic title “Every Exit Brings You Home,” deserves to awaken a much larger audience. This is one of those rare stories that feels at once universal and impossibly strange, rooted in the ordinary challenges of the American Dream but lashed to horrors unfolding on the other side of the planet.

Murr’s hero is a handsome Middle Eastern man in his late 30s named Jack. He serves, dutifully, as the president of his condo association in Chicago. With the Great Recession decimating the housing market, he and all his fellow owners are underwater on their mortgages, and their shoddily converted building is groaning for costly repairs.

None of that is known to Marcia, a pugnacious woman who moves into the basement garden apartment with her young daughter and elaborately tattooed partner. Immediately, Jack swoops down from the top floor to serve as host, therapist and diplomat. Juggling angry texts from an embittered neighbor — “ARE YOU HERDING ELEPHANTS? WHAT IS HORRIBLE NOISE?” — he welcomes Marcia and her family, sweeps their daughter up to his wife for babysitting and helps them get settled.

This expansive role as the ultimate hospitality director seems natural to Jack, but we quickly learn that it’s another persona constructed by “an inchoate being,” a lost man who’s been “diffusing himself throughout this country” for almost 20 years. At home, Jack — actually Jamal — is a devoted husband to Dimra, a Palestinian woman who’s suffered several miscarriages and hopes that IVF might finally bring them a child. But at work, Jack is a flight attendant posing as a gay man in a long-term relationship with an imaginary partner. How this bizarre duplicity began is not nearly as interesting as what it suggests about Jack’s fluid desires and the clashing demands he navigates.

The structure of “Every Exit Brings You Home” is a work of magic. The story shifts between past and present, near and far, as gracefully as dusk gives way to night. At home, Jack’s contentious neighbors clamor for his attention like needy children even as his wife, whom he regards with a mixture of “love, regret, and sorrow,” denies her excruciating symptoms to maintain the sanctuary of their loving marriage. Meanwhile, at work, aloft in the friendly skies, Jack assumes a Midwestern accent and pretends his affections for a young stewardess are merely platonic.

Murr’s deft interweaving of domestic drama and political memory is the novel’s central triumph. What transforms the story and will never leave you are Jack’s memories of growing up in Beach Camp in Gaza. The only son of an aristocratic Egyptian and a militant Palestinian, young Jack lived in a terrarium of Western culture amid a chaotic maze of shacks. His mother home-schooled him on British classics, and by 7, he was speaking Parisian French and BBC English. He became expert at code-switching and suppressing his effeminate manners. But deeply alienated from his father, who spent half his life in Israeli jails, Jack has no way to navigate his erotic desires, which flow far outside the boundaries of Gaza’s violently conservative culture.

The Israeli military’s cruelty inflames these pages, but any partisan reading of this novel would require ignoring Murr’s attention to the structural tragedy of the quagmire in Gaza. Yes, IDF soldiers overreact with wanton disregard for human life, but Palestinian militants depend upon those overreactions — and purposely provoke them — to win more converts. And the novel’s most shocking scenes involve the actions of an emerging faction called Hamas, which sadistically sacrifices Palestinians to further its cause. In short, this is not a book animated by political grievance; it’s a work of art wet with the tears of generations.

“There was plenty of joy in Gaza too,” Jack insists. But his memories of what he and his family endured there are so visceral that we return to the story of his troubles in Chicago in the same disoriented daze that he feels when his attention is wrenched back to the present day. “The lees of the past stirred up in him,” Murr writes, “and he was rife with anxiety about his wife’s health, her parents’ survival, their own dire finances, the growing realization that he’d never be a father. This life of being no one, nowhere, would go on and on.

Freighted with this “endemic shame,” Jack thinks of himself as a pervert and a deviant, constantly wrestling with “all the misaligned vectors of his being.” His wife’s uncomplaining devotion starts to feel like an acid bath on his conscience. In this impossibly conflicted world, Jack’s fluid sexuality becomes indicative of his struggle to transcend the strict boundaries laid out for him, to find love in a life strafed by hate.

To some extent, Murr’s own history mirrors that unsettled existence. The son of an Irish woman and a Lebanese-Palestinian father, he was born in England, but spent several years as a child in Beirut and finally moved to the United States in his 20s. In an interview more than a decade ago, he recalled the way his mother trained him to speak with a posh English accent, which made him an outsider almost everywhere he went. “I grew up in a world and culture that in some ways was alien, even inimical to me. Not Lebanese, not Irish, not English, neither upper nor lower class,” he said. “I was without an identity — an outsider, an impostor.”

Jack responds to that chronic unease with a desperation to please, to comfort, to heal everyone around him. It’s an exhausting doomed endeavor, rendered in lush searching prose that’s quietly mesmerizing.

The timeliness of “Every Exit Brings You Home” registers as both a coincidence and an indictment. The story unfolds as an exquisite sigh of desperation, of hope singed by denial and disappointment but not entirely burned away. “This world was tragic to him,” Murr writes, “doubly tragic, then, that he should love it.” As Jack hovers between cultures, between wars and desires, you can’t help but yearn for him to land somewhere safe. The Washington Post, Ron Charles

Kirkus STARRED review:

Domestic strife in his adopted city of Chicago proves a fleeting distraction from the atrocities that Jamal—now Jack—Shaban and Dimra, his traditional Muslim wife, left behind in a Gaza refugee camp.

When they fled Gaza two decades ago, against her parent’s wishes, the couple had hoped for a bright future in the Windy City that included children. But Dimra’s series of miscarriages and crippling illness have compromised that dream. The nonreligious Jack, who dutifully manages their condo association in addition to working as a flight attendant, is further burdened by the endless noise of complaining residents including a newly arrived single mother, Marcia, who is livid about her foul basement unit. Compared to the pain and suffering in Gaza, which “had become bodies removed from shattered homes, wreathed in blood and concrete dust,” life in the U.S. is a walk in the park. But that walk becomes bumpy when Jack poses as gay at work to avoid getting romantically involved with a vivacious friend called Birdy—and the desperate Marcia begins using Dimra as daycare for her children for longer and longer stretches. The British-born Murr, who is of Palestinian descent, does a masterful job of bridging ordinary and extraordinary experience, achieving an unlikely balance between the stark tragedy of war and the gentle comedy of everyday people struggling with fate. “I’ve become the Occupied Territories,” Dimra says, sadly joking about the cancerous tumors inside her. Unlike his father, Jack is not political, but his head is unavoidably filled with images of Israel’s unfathomable offenses. All of which makes a childhood memory of him and his book-loving mother “sobbing over the death of Beth March, Little Nell, or Lennie Small” while their camp was “filled with black smoke, tear gas, and shouts of protest” pretty unforgettable.

A great novel: Beautifully written, timely, and as enjoyable as it is heartbreaking, Kirkus starred review.

“A heartbreaking and thrillingly suspenseful story about tragic histories and new beginnings.” Jenny Offill, author of Weather

“This is the best novel I’ve read in years, with everything a reader could want: complex characters, political wisdom, comedy, tragedy, soul. Naeem Murr has a particular gift for conveying the intimacies between characters, but his genius is for drawing his readers into the world of these intimacies and lives so vividly they won’t want to leave it.” Christian Wiman, author of My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“This poignant, at times hilarious, at times tragic, always compelling novel knocked me out. It’s both intimate and expansive, digging deep into the emotional intricacies of love and into the devastation of war and the longing for family and home. As soon as I finished it, I bought the author’s other books, so loathe was I to leave his assured, even brilliant, company.” Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

“This fiercely moving novel is a gorgeous account of the parallel tracks we all contain: the one that takes us into the past (and brings the past constantly forward) and the other that moves us through the world we are always in the process of creating. I loved it.” Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen’s Pier and The Children’s Crusade

Naeem Murr lays bare the human cost of dispossession, weaving the brutal realities of Middle Eastern politics with the personal fight for dignity and truth. Urgent, unflinching, and impossible to ignore, Every Exit Brings You Home will linger in the imagination long after the last page. Diana Abujaber, author of Crescent and Fencing with the King