Every Exit Brings You Home Author: Naeem Murr ISBN-13: 978-1-3985-6490-9Publisher: Summit Books Guideline Price: £18.99; 321 pp Naeem Murr is a lauded Palestinian-Irish writer - his mother is Irish - who grew up in London and lives now in Chicago, where he writes and teaches. Jack, the hero of Every Exit Brings You Home, has a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother and lives in Chicago, where he works as a flight attendant. While the similarities in circumstance between the novelist and his protagonist may end there, the effects of the brutal and tragic heritage they share as Palestinians are searingly unwrapped in this deeply absorbing and passionately felt novel.Jack’s wife, Dimra, longs for a baby but suffers only a series of miscarriages. Beautiful Dimra is a lost soul who spends her days in front of the television with its daily hell of “explosions, stone-throwing children, corpses and weeping mothers” in her native Gaza, and dreams of moving to “the ersatz heaven of Chicago’s north suburbs”. Jack, criss-crossing the skies over North America, lives a double life. The other flight attendants don’t know that his real name is Jamal, that he grew up in Palestine’s Beach Camp, and that he’s not actually gay as he pretends. When he falls hard for flight attendant Birdy, his ingrained habit of deceit causes her as much misery as it does him. At home in their ramshackle condo, Jack is the go-to for problem-ridden tenants such as single mother Marcia, whose precarious life on the edges of destitution and addiction embodies the sham of the American dream. It’s Jack who fixes the leaking pipes, calms the rows, negotiates with the landlord and gets them to their essential appointments in his rattly car. And thinks how “exhausting it was to love - to care about - people so victimised, wounded and fragile that it was impossible to imagine anything could ever change”. But immersive as the little world of the condo is, Jack’s and Dimra’s Gaza is the most consuming. A Gaza where love is hopeless, hope is fruitless, and shame and betrayal are inevitable. The Gaza that lives with Jack’s uncle’s bitter refrain in its ears - “bye bye Palestine”.Anne Haverty is a novelist and poet