This is a story of a family coming full circle. Abba's grown children, Hanna, and Jamal could not tell where their parents came from because no one told them. Abbas was a runaway, and their mother was abandoned when she was a baby and later ran away from her foster parents. Abbas just refused to speak about his past, and his wife does not know her real parents.
When Abbas had a stroke and could hardly speak, he finally had the need to tell his wife, Maryam, his story and she compelled him to tell his story to his children by recording when he is not too weak to talk. It was a sad and nostalgic ordeal for Abbas looking back and narrating the story. Telling the story brought him bad and good memories of growing up with a tyrant father and being the first of his siblings to be able to go to school. He marveled at his adventures as a sailor and the friends he made on his journeys and stressed out on reflecting on how things turned out to be.
Abbas thought that keeping the secret would be best for his family, thinking that perhaps they would lose their respect for him if they knew his story, and at the same time, he thought for their sake that not knowing would be best for them to move on in life, start fresh with hope, not letting the story of their origin dictate their future.
I enjoyed reading this book in terms of the sincerity of the characters even though it's fiction, I like the raw and sincere reality that each character portrays.
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