Fiction

From sunrise to sunset, season to season, we do not know what hardship will fall upon our path. It is by faith and grace we do not stumble. And when we do, it is by faith and grace we rise again.

SO BEGINS the Mahari love story, at once a keen and fertile legend of a noble people who live by the Maker’s truth, mercy, loving-kindness, forgiveness, and resilience.

Set in America and the Middle East in the early 1990s, The Feminine Art is the story of Suham, a married woman who distracts herself from boredom by trying to find her nephew, Michael, a wife. The perfect bride happens to be in Baghdad. As the arranged wedding takes a shape of its own, Suham and Michael are challenged to face the truths within themselves that had been kept hidden behind tradition and illusion.

To escape the military under Saddam’s harsh regime, Amel flees Baghdad after the Gulf War, just before his eighteenth birthday. Smart choice! He illegally immigrates into Athens, where he meets his first adversities—one of which is a boss captivated by women and trees, the other a roommate who switches price stickers on grocery products to charge Amel more money. Amel’s world changes when Dunia, his American cousin and the love of his life, comes to Greece for a semester. His struggles to win her love and his attempts to make it to America lead Amel to his true fate and his adulthood.

Mervat was born in Iraq as a minority Christian and in the late 1970s and came to America at age two. Torn between her cultural heritage which dates back over 7300 years and the new land of freedom and opportunity, she watches friends live an Americanized lifestyle while she clings onto Middle Eastern traditions, all along yearning for the courage to follow her own path, to "Trust thyself" as Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasized. Then she meets Johnny, the perfect potential suitor, but he brings along multiple complications. As their relationship faces its challenges, Mervat's desire for having individuality while maintaining her tribal lifestyle escorts her to the discovery of unexpected cultures and beliefs.

MR. ROCHESTR is the story, told in his own words, of the strange and difficult man who captured Jane Eyre's heart.