Stranger in the Desert

Zibby Mag, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year

"Stranger in the Desert is a beautiful, soulful story ranging across continents and languages, topographies and etymologies, time and space. Through a pastiche of maps, diaries, and archival materials, Jordan Salama attempts to piece together a lost family history, and the result is both delightfully idiosyncratic yet somehow still universal, revealing a great deal about the elusive concepts of identity and home, and what it means to find one's place in the world by following one's roots." —Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author

“Salama has a precocious curiosity about his family’s past and a journalist’s determination to hit the road in search of it. His book is at once a young man’s quest for identity and a travelogue that tenderly evokes the sights, sounds, and stories of his ancestors’ worlds.” —Ariel Sabar, author of My Father’s Paradise

Praise for Jordan Salama:

"Jordan Salama writes with an attentiveness, and a sense of adventure, that many of us might envy; this engaging, intrepid debut promises many more wonders to come. Already he’s shown himself to be a writer with a rare (and inspiring) commitment to giving us the world.” —Pico Iyer, author of Autumn Light

“A born journalist."—John McPhee, Princeton University News