Hotline

Canadian novelist Nasrullah’s (The Bleeds) layered and intimate portrait of an immigrant mother from Lebanon in 1980s Montreal is based on his own mother’s experience. Muna Heddad and her son have immigrated to Montreal, escaping civil war and violence in Lebanon. The only job Muna can get is as a dieting hotline operator, where she supports clients who pour out their worries and fears to her. Muna realizes that many of them wouldn’t speak to her if they saw her on the street. The book is a meditation on Western culture’s individualism and loneliness epidemic and the shocking emptiness of the economic promises of immigration to North America. Throughout Muna’s narrative, Nasrullah sprinkles in untranslated Arabic and French words, which prompts monolingual English readers to read between the lines and shines a light on Lebanese culture. Highlighting xenophobia in Western society and the experience of being forced to compromise identity for income, Nasrullah’s novel lays out how Western systems are not set up for helping immigrants access economic or community stability in mainstream society.