I Will Greet the Sun Again

K is the youngest of three brothers in the San Fernando Valley, and his one wish is to pass as a boy from L.A., all American. He is named after a Persian king, and he senses early that he does not fit the picture. His feelings for his closest friend, Johnny, are a longing he cannot tell anyone about.

At home, K is the dutiful son of Iranian immigrants who are working hard to build a life in the United States. He tries to be the son his mother hopes for. On Friday nights he goes with his father, Baba, to prayers at the local mosque. Baba's affection is violent, and it bends K's sense of what a man is and how a person is supposed to love.

Then Baba takes all three brothers away from their mother and back to Iran. K ends up in an ancestral home he barely knows. When he returns to the Valley months later, it feels as foreign as the place he just left, and he has to work out who he is from scratch.

This is a literary coming-of-age novel about a queer Muslim kid growing up in America, following K from boyhood into youth. The tone is tender, though it does not look away from brutality, at home or in the wider country. It is a book of identity, family and first love, told close to one boy's experience.