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  • Published: 15 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593557594
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

Arab Boy Delivered

A Novel

  • Paul Aziz Zarou


As Michael maneuvers through his working-class neighborhood delivering groceries, he enters the homes and lives of his customers. He’s confronted by the school yard and street corner violence of local thugs. With the 1967 Arab-Israeli War fresh in public memory, he passes for Greek or Italian and never summons the courage to explain, exactly, who he is or where his parents came from.

Michael weighs his obligations to his tight knit family and sees before him a life of constricted ambitions. Then he falls for a radical college coed, returned to the neighborhood after two years of college. She teaches Michael about sex, love, the obligation to protest injustice. His life is buffeted by the killing of Martin Luther King, Jr and the death, two months later, of Bobby Kennedy. His girlfriend opens his eyes to the ongoing national struggle to test national ideals against the growing diversity of America.

Michael grieves with a mother whose only son died in the Vietnam War and is embraced by the first black couple who move into the neighborhood. The people he meets shape him. His mind is a potpourri of his experiences: hatred, kindness, his own sexual awakening. Michael struggles to figure out who this dutiful son of an immigrant family is becoming in a rapidly emerging modern world, epitomized by the big, brash, obnoxious city on the other side of the East River.

  • Published: 15 March 2022
  • ISBN: 9780593557594
  • Imprint: RH US Audio Adult
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $23.00

Praise for Arab Boy Delivered

Zarou’s characters are familiar faces from the old neighborhood: first crushes, overprotective fathers, the bully-gang, mother hens overseeing the block. At the center of a rich tapestry of multi-generational America is Michael Haddad, the son of Palestinian immigrants. His coming of age story, set against the turbulent 1960's, widens to encompass the ordinary lives of people we’ve all known, those who’ve loved and taught us, those who’ve gathered us in their folds, and those who’ve made us suffer. Ultimately, Zarou reminds us of the boundless power of family and friends as we discover who we are.
- Sahar Mustafah: Core Faculty Story Studio Chicago, Youth Programming, author of The Beauty of Your Face, W.W. Norton (April 2020), 100 Notable Books of 2020 - New York Times Book Review