The Wrong End of the Telescope

Alameddine’s spectacular novel is rendered through the refreshingly honest lens of Dr. Mina … Alameddine’s irreverent prose evokes the old master storytellers from my own Middle Eastern home … deeply poignant * New York Times *Alameddine hits a distinctly contemporary note with this new book about refugees … it feels totally authentic on Middle Eastern culture * The Sunday Times *‘The Wrong End of the Telescope doesn’t so much switch between emotional registers as occupy all of them at once - humour, grief, anger, melancholy, love of every stripe. It’s a beautiful, well paced, enraging, funny and heartbreaking book’ * The Guardian *The Wrong End of the Telescope is the best kind of prose. Lines break out like poetry and the story muscles on, telling. The setting is real history which I’m hungry for and Rabih Alameddine queers it handsomely with all kinds of love and a feeling that existence is pure experience, not language at all and the shape of this book, right up to the end, is a becoming. * Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow and Chelsea Girls *Rabih Alameddine is a master of both the intimate and the global – and The Wrong End of the Telescope finds him at the top of his craft. A story of rescue, identity, deracination, and connection, this novel is timely and urgent and a lot of fun. * Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers. *The incomparable Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel shows sly wit, poetic turns of phrase, and the slow-burning outrage at the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis–but I particularly love his understated handling of Mina, the novel’s transgender narrator. Her identity is not a battlefield for the culture wars, just a refreshingly unproblematic perspective from which a story unfolds. * Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution *‘Devastating and wondrous. Nobody write like Rabih. Nobody gets anywhere close’ – John Green‘I still can not understand why people do not jump up and down The Wrong End of the Telescope by Rabih Alameddine. I loved this one so much that as soon as I finished it, I went and bought the entire Alameddine’s backlist’ * jNews *A pointed, poignant and often hilarious story…He has an ability to collect and create beauty, and to remain in a state of incandescent anger at politicians and what they have done with the world * Financial Times *

Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv.