Return
Why We Go Back to Where We Come From
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Globe and Mail, Hill Times and CBC Best Book of the Year
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to return to your roots?
Drawing on astute political analysis and extensive reporting from around the world, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From illuminates a personal quest. Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of the bestselling and award-winning Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), yearns to return to his homeland of Yemen, now wracked by war, starvation and daily violence, to reconnect with his family. Yemen, as well as Egypt, another childhood home, call to him, even though he ran away from them in his youth and found peace and prosperity in Canada.
In Return, Al-Solaylee interviews dozens of people who have chosen to or long to return to their homelands, from Basques to Irish to Taiwanese. He does make a return of sorts himself, to the Middle East, visiting Israel and the West Bank, as well as Egypt. A chronicle of love and loss, of global reach and personal desires, Return is a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to return to their roots.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When we hear the word “diaspora,” we think of the many people who have left their homelands behind to settle in new, faraway places. But what about those who don’t stay settled? In this fascinating book, journalist Kamal Al-Solaylee speaks to people who left or were forced to flee their home country to start over—and then eventually decided to put their new life aside and return to their mother country. We were fascinated by the variety of experiences that Al-Solaylee captures as he sits down with people from places ranging from Taiwan to the Basque region of Spain. Though he brings a keen academic eye to these compelling stories, Al-Solaylee maintains a conversational and personal tone, especially when he makes an emotional trip back to his childhood home in Egypt. Return is a provocative book that will make you look at refugees, immigration, and even the concept of home in a whole new light.
