Most Anticipated Reads! Home Is Not A Country by Safia Elhillo.

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Release Date: 2nd March 2021

Publisher: Make Me A World

ISBN: 0593177053

Oh my goodness I can’t stop looking at this gorgeous cover! It is absolutely stunning and stopped me in my tracks as I was scrolling through Twitter. Then, once I read the premise, I knew this had to go on my TBR list for next year.

Nima doesn’t feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself.Until she doesn’t. 

As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen, the name her parents didn’t give her at birth: Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might just be more real than Nima knows. And more hungry. And the life Nima has, the one she keeps wishing were someone else’s. . .she might have to fight for it with a fierceness she never knew she had.

Early reviews suggest that the author has created an incredible world around her main character, using words like ‘lush’ and ‘magical’. I’m so looking forward to a different reading experience – the book is written in verse. It also has some of my favourite themes, such as how we construct an identity for ourselves, finding our place within a family and a culture. Categorised as YA, I think this is a book that will transcend that label and be read by teens and adults alike.

Meet The Author |

Safia Elhillo is the author of the poetry collection The January Children, which received the the 2016 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and a 2018 Arab American Book Award.

Sudanese by way of Washington, DC, she holds an MFA from The New School, a Cave Canem Fellowship, and a 2018 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Safia is a Pushcart Prize nominee, co-winner of the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 30 Under 30. She is a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.