"Behind you is the sea" by Susan Muaddi Darraj

An audio book set in Baltimore.

I didn't realise until too late that the book is interconnected stories, which complicates things because I listened to the book. I should have made more notes. The sections are "Ride along", “Hashtag”, “Mr. Ammar Gets Drunk at a Wedding” , "Behind you is the sea", “Cleaning Lentils”, “Gyroscopes,” “Worry Beads”, “Escorting the Body” and one other (but not in that order).

Marcus is a policeman whose mother died 14 years before. He saves a battered wife with child from more abuse. His 36 y.o. girlfriend Michelle wants them to get married. When he hints that they should break up she accidentally shoots towards him, grazing him. At the end Marcus has to break the door down to find the dead body of his father who he'd not seen for years. He has to take the body to Israel. There he meets Rita who's been looking after the family house. She'd been a hunger striker, ostracised, and Marcus' father had helped her. Marcus teaches her how to use a gun and marries her so she can benefit from the death.

In between, Amal (sister of Marcus) is planning to marry a black music Masters student. Her father is against it. Rania is trying to get her son Eddy into a normal school. A school play is being organised, rewritten so that the anti-Arab parts ae removed - like Disney's Aladdin remake. A cleaner has sex with a client. A woman who'd been divorced by a man because she didn't bear a child with him gets pregnant when at 39 she sleeps with another man. A woman is pregnant thanks to Tori. Her father is going to die soon. She has a job at a restaurant owned by a man who came from the same village as her parents. She is at high school. Tori's 2 years older.

Other reviews

• Charles Rammelkamp (Honor and shame are at the heart of their dramas. The nine chapters of the novel, each with a title of its own, read like the short stories that they are. Beginning with a birth and ending with a funeral, Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Behind You Is the Sea has a satisfying sense of completion by the end of the book, even as so many dramas remain unresolved)
• Kate Gardner (There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people ... They’re all Christians – though multiple characters are assumed by other people to be Muslim.)
• Molly McGinnis (It’s rare to find an author who can pull off such a feat, but Muaddi Darraj has assembled a cast whose members both create a clear sense of community and stand out for reasons all their own.)