MARIAM: A Novel

Mariam learned to translate the world for her family and her family to the world. The one life she never learned to translate was her own.At nine years old, Mariam leaves Baghdad with her family, carrying more than she understands.First comes Amman. Then Lyon. A new language. New schools. New rules. And, little by little, a new role inside her own family: the daughter who can explain, translate, smooth things over, and make difficult situations easier for everyone else.What begins as usefulness becomes identity.Years later, Mariam is an architect building a life that looks increasingly like her own. She has work she cares about, a city she knows intimately, a family she loves, and Adil-a man she can imagine marrying.But the closer that imagined future comes, the harder one question becomes to avoid: What does Mariam actually want when nobody needs her to translate, adapt, or make everything work?Moving between Baghdad, Amman, and Lyon, MARIAM is a deeply intimate literary novel about migration, family, language, love, and the complicated distance between belonging somewhere and belonging to yourself.It is a story about the lives we inherit, the lives others imagine for us, and the quiet courage required to choose without certainty.