Fire in Every Direction
A Memoir
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
“I am forever changed after reading this book.” —Javier Zamora, author of Solito
From the renowned Palestinian scholar, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.
Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.
In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother, Eva, would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, Rima, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle class life—still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.
After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past, and begins to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him: hushed whispers overheard, stories of his mother’s years as an activist in Beirut and her return to Palestine during a moment of calm.
Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.
This is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this poignant autobiography, queer Palestinian writer and activist Baconi (Hamas Contained) tenderly explores identity, nationality, and family history. In the prologue, Baconi uncovers a box of mementos that includes letters from a childhood friend named Ramzi, with whom he fell in love. From there, he traces his family's harrowing migrations from Palestine to Lebanon to Jordan in the late 20th century, fleeing violence with every move. At the core of the account is Baconi's adolescent sexual awakening and his struggle to reconcile his identity as a gay man with the expectations of a culture and family that marginalized him. The "exile of the authentic self," as he puts it, becomes a powerful lens through which he examines both personal and political exile. In one especially affecting passage, Baconi recounts moving from London to study in Ramallah as an adult, only to find that everything he once knew of the city is gone, effectively erasing a place of solace from his emotional map. Bolstered, however, by Ramzi's letters and the hard work of self-acceptance, Baconi cobbles together a convincing message of hope, asserting that "in the most abject of spaces, in the queerest of selves, beauty abounds." With lyrical prose and shrewd narrative instincts, Baconi transmutes hardship into comfort. Readers will find it difficult not to be moved.
