Elsa's search for a better life for her children takes them out west to California, where things turn out to be even worse. Though she finds some joy working the land, tending the animals, and learning her way around Mama Rose's kitchen, her marriage is never happy, the pleasures of early motherhood are brief, and soon the disastrous droughts of the 1930s drive all the farmers of the area to despair and starvation. Despised by her shallow parents and sisters for being sickly and unattractive-“too tall, too thin, too pale, too unsure of herself”-Elsa escapes their cruelty when a single night of abandon leads to pregnancy and forced marriage to the son of Italian immigrant farmers. There were times in my journey when I felt as if that penny and the hope it represented were the only things that kept me going.” We meet Elsa Wolcott in Dalhart, Texas, in 1921, on the eve of her 25th birthday, and wind up with her in California in 1936 in a saga of almost unrelieved woe. “Hope is a coin I carry: an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love.
The miseries of the Depression and Dust Bowl years shape the destiny of a Texas family. What she wants so desperately-intimacy, stability, success-will come at a high cost.Ī heartbreaking story about war, family, and love. “To identify that thing you long for and seek it out, it’s heartbreakingly human,” Olivia thinks. This is an unforgettable story about war and family, responsibility and love, but Sardar also pays tribute to the priceless connections we forge at the most terrible moments. Warm and lush descriptions of the Kurdish countryside and culture contrast vividly to sudden moments of unthinkable violence. Sardar’s decision to make her protagonist American and not Kurdish is deliberate, and she places the reader squarely in Olivia’s inexperienced shoes with compassion and insight. Olivia is dimly aware that the country is politically unsettled, but the landscape turns out to be far more treacherous than she imagined, and life-threatening chaos shatters her romantic notions about photography in a war zone.
When her actor boyfriend, Delan, a Kurdish immigrant, decides to attend a family wedding in northern Iraq, she jumps at the chance to tag along, thrilled at the idea of traveling to such a bold destination, meeting his family, and, most importantly, taking the sort of exotic photos that will secure her a new career. Set in 1979, the novel focuses on Olivia, a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper who dreams of becoming a professional photographer. Inspired by her father’s stories of growing up in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Sardar’s new novel is a devastating reminder of what happens when American privilege smacks against hard reality.
An aspiring American photographer travels to war-ravaged Kurdistan with her Iraqi-born boyfriend.
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