Hotline

August 1, 2024
It's 1986, and the war in Lebanon rages on, even as the world's attention has drifted away. Muna arrives in Canada with little except her eight-year-old son, the memory of her kidnapped husband, and her desire to teach French. In Montreal, she quickly finds that being qualified to teach isn't enough to land her a job. Left with few options, Muna takes a job as a hotline operator at a diet food company, becoming Mona when on the phone. While the job pays the rent for their furnished apartment and keeps boxes of the company's low-calorie food in their cupboards, it leaves her son coming home to only the TV for company and connects Muna to the secrets and sadnesses of her clients. Admiration for Muna's persistence in the face of discrimination and distrust shines through this fictionalized account of Nasrallah's mother. At once a specific snapshot in time and also a tribute to the hardships and triumphs of the immigrant experience, Hotline will have readers cheering Muna on as she adapts to her new country.

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October 18, 2024

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. VERDICT Readers seeking insight into immigrant experiences will appreciate this novel, which was a bestseller in Canada.--Annie Windholz

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