Publisher's Synopsis
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award Longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award An Amazon Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Bestseller Named a Best Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, Boston Globe, Fodor's, Fast Company, Refinery29,Nylon, Book Riot, The Millions, Electric Literature, Bitch, Hello Giggles, Literary Hub, Shondaland, Bustle, Vol. 1 Brooklyn,Read It Forward,Entropy Magazine,Chicago Review of Books, iBooks and Publishers Weekly After the death of her father, an exiled Iranian man of letters, the bookish twenty-two-year-old Zebra finds herself alone in New York and decides to retrace the steps of her traumatic flight with her family from their homeland in the 1990s, hoping that in the process she will be inspired to write a major manifesto on literature. Her first stop is Barcelona, where she meets the Italian Ludo, who becomes her lover, intellectual sparring partner and travelling companion in her picaresque meanderings around Catalonia. A natural-born raconteur, Zebra takes the reader on an irresistible journey through her thoughts, as she conceives elaborate theories about art and is increasingly convinced that her mother has been reincarnated as a cockatoo. Sparkling with wit and mischief and brimming with imaginative vignettes and unconventional musings, Call Me Zebra is a riotous, erudite, unpredictable novel about literature, lust and dislocation.
