Tag Archives: Iraqi

Happy Arab American Heritage Month 2025!

It’s Arab American Heritage Month, and as always, we’re celebrating with books starring protagonists of Arab descent! 

Young Adult

A Guide to the Dark by Miriam Metoui

60037002Something is building, simmering just out of reach.

The room is watching. But Mira and Layla don’t know this yet. When the two best friends are stranded on their spring break college tour road trip, they find themselves at the Wildwood Motel, located in the middle of nowhere, Indiana. Mira can’t shake the feeling that there is something wrong and rotten about their room. Inside, she’s haunted by nightmares of her dead brother. When she wakes up, he’s still there.

Layla doesn’t see him. Or notice anything suspicious about Room 9. The place may be a little run down, but it has a certain charm she can’t wait to capture on camera. If Layla is being honest, she’s too preoccupied with confusing feelings for Mira to see much else. But when they learn eight people died in that same room, they realize there must be a connection between the deaths and the unexplainable things that keep happening inside it. They just have to find the connection before Mira becomes the ninth.

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon

Continue reading Happy Arab American Heritage Month 2025!

Fave Five: LGBTQ Fiction with Arab MCs

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar (Syrian)

A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar (Egyptian-Palestinian)

Guapa by Saleem Haddad (Unnamed)

God in Pink by Hassan Namir (Iraqi) 

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat (Palestinian)

Bonus: Once & Future by Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy is set in a fictional universe, but the refugee MC’s background is based on McCarthy’s Lebanese background

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