Every Exit Brings You Home: A Novel

by Naeem Murr

A profound, bittersweet portrait of a Gazan immigrant’s heroic efforts to heal his community and birth love from tragedy.


As a financial crisis looms, Jamal “Jack” Shaban is trying to save the residents of his Chicago condo from bankruptcy. But who is Jack, really?


Is he Midwestern, born and bred? Egyptian? Straight or gay? For his flight attendant colleagues, he’s an object of desire, even love, particularly for his sweetly bawdy Wisconsinite best friend, Birdy. Birdy knows nothing about Dimra, Jack’s traditional Muslim wife, with whom Jack is desperate to have a child. Enter an angry single mom new to Jack’s building. The resulting tangle of love, desire, and conflict returns Jack to the violence of 1980s Gaza, where a taboo affair nearly destroyed his life. All that anyone truly knows about Jack is how readily he sacrifices himself for peace between his embittered neighbors.


With Jack’s impassioned care for others at its heart, this gorgeous novel weaves past and present, tragedy and bittersweet comedy, into a brilliant allegory for this wounded world we must all share.

336 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 3, 2026

About the author

Naeem Murrʼs first novel, The Boy, was a New York Times Notable Book. Another novel, The Genius of the Sea, was published in 2003. His latest, The Perfect Man, was awarded The Commonwealth Writersʼ Prize for the Best Book of Europe and South Asia, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His work has been translated into eight languages. He has received many awards for his writing, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pen Beyond Margins Award. He has been a writer-in-residence at the University of Missouri, Western Michigan, and Northwestern University, among others. Born and brought up in London, he has lived in America since his early twenties, and currently resides in Chicago.

Photo: copyright Alan Cross.