Stranger in the Desert

Finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
Town and Country, A Must Read Book for 2024
Zibby Mag, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year
Bookshop, A Most Anticipated Title of the Year

“Part intensely personal memoir, part history, Salama’s search to learn more about who he came from will connect with readers.” —Katie Moench, Book Riot

“A nonchronological personal narrative rather than a standard travel memoir, Stranger in the Desert is a reflection on family history, identity, and storytelling.” —Laura Chanoux, Booklist

“Readers will be left musing on their own family histories, perhaps wondering what they might discover if they were to follow a loose thread or two.” —Shelf Awareness

“Salama’s rapport with readers remains unquestioned. An accomplished sophomore effort from an unusually gifted young writer.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Stranger in the Desert is a beautiful, soulful story ranging across continents and languages, topographies and etymologies, time and space. Through a pastiche of maps, diaries, and archival materials, Jordan Salama attempts to piece together a lost family history, and the result is both delightfully idiosyncratic yet somehow still universal, revealing a great deal about the elusive concepts of identity and home, and what it means to find one’s place in the world by following one’s roots.” —Jennifer Senior, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author

“Salama has a precocious curiosity about his family’s past and a journalist’s determination to hit the road in search of it. His book is at once a young man’s quest for identity and a travelogue that tenderly evokes the sights, sounds, and stories of his ancestors’ worlds.” —Ariel Sabar, author of My Father’s Paradise

Jordan Salama is a writer covering culture and the environment in the Americas. He is the author of Every Day the River Changes, a journey down Colombia’s Rio Magdalena, which was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2021. His essays and stories have appeared in National Geographic, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Scientific American, NPR’s All Things Considered and other publications. Most recently, his story “The Candy Sellers,” an investigation into the lives of migrant families selling candy on the NYC subway, was on the cover of New York magazine. He lives in New York.

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