The Apricot Tree

Pauline Kaldas is a keen observer of the immigrant condition, illuminating the lives of people who share the experience of changing countries and being changed by them.

–Laila Lalami, author of The Dream Hotel

Though a collection of short stories, The Apricot Tree reads like a novel in the way it explores deeply and thoroughly both individual human consciousness and the subjective experiences of everyday people’s everyday lives. The result is a deepening sense of what makes the characters in these linked stories more like us, despite the differences between their lived experiences and our own. A major accomplishment of the best fiction is when the lives of ordinary, diverse people become not only more intelligible to us, and we more empathetic to them, but when the mirror that the writing creates is clear, vivid, and reflective of what we may otherwise overlook. With this book, Kaldas accomplishes all these.

–Hayan Charara, author of Hush Little Children

In The Apricot Tree, Pauline Kaldas writes with clarity and quiet grace, illuminating the inner lives of those caught between worlds. These stories of interconnected characters capture the ache of displacement and the persistent search for belonging. Tender, precise, and profoundly human.

–Balli Kaur Jaswal, author of Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows

From the author of The Measure of Distance, Looking Both Ways, and The Time Between Places comes The Apricot Tree, a poignant tale-in-stories whose remarkable map is both geographic and emotional, a collection that guides readers through the communal losses and joys of the American immigrant experience. The collection’s connective tissue is the path of an Egyptian immigrant named Busyana, whose point of view will immediately captivate readers. In the collection we hear from all the lives Busyana touches, from Adnan, a young Palestinian whose culinary and social exploration lands him in the kitchen of a Harlem restaurant, to Dominykas, the Lithuanian who shares late-life love with Busyana before the march of time splits them.

Each story in The Apricot Tree is a sacred marvel, not simply an instruction manual for creating community, but a guide for keeping the faith. When Anhe, a young girl from Shanghai, says, “you can live in China and America at the same time,” we understand that the cultural bridge is both something we create and something we contain; by the end of these seven compelling short stories, we understand that the adjustment of moving to another country is, in fact, an eternal cycle of welcome, of receiving even in giving. Truly, this collection is a gift, a powerful gift from one of the most essential voices in contemporary literature.

–Jacinda Townsend, author of Trigger Warning and Mother Country