The Wrong End of the Telescope

'The Wrong End of the Telescope doesn't so much switch between emotional registers as occupy all of them at once - humour, grief, anger, melancholy, love of every stripe. It's a beautiful, well paced, enraging, funny and heartbreaking book' - The Guardian

Alameddine's spectacular novel is rendered through the refreshingly honest lens of Dr. Mina . . . Alameddine's irreverent prose evokes the old master storytellers from my own Middle Eastern home . . . deeply poignant - New York Times

Alameddine hits a distinctly contemporary note with this new book about refugees . . . it feels totally authentic on Middle Eastern culture - The Sunday Times

Rabih Alameddine is a master of both the intimate and the global -- and The Wrong End of the Telescope finds him at the top of his craft. A story of rescue, identity, deracination, and connection, this novel is timely and urgent and a lot of fun. - Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers.

The Wrong End of the Telescope is the best kind of prose. Lines break out like poetry and the story muscles on, telling. The setting is real history which I'm hungry for and Rabih Alameddine queers it handsomely with all kinds of love and a feeling that existence is pure experience, not language at all and the shape of this book, right up to the end, is a becoming. - Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow and Chelsea Girls

The incomparable Rabih Alameddine's latest novel shows sly wit, poetic turns of phrase, and the slow-burning outrage at the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis--but I particularly love his understated handling of Mina, the novel's transgender narrator. Her identity is not a battlefield for the culture wars, just a refreshingly unproblematic perspective from which a story unfolds. - Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today s Revolution