Right from the first chapter, you tell me that Sara Tarek Al-Ameed’s story is not only her own. Sara, a philosophy professor, is spending the night in the women’s section of a Kuwaiti jail, arrested for blasphemy (under a fictional version of a law that nearly came to pass). She reads the graffiti on the walls and floor and toilet of her cell; the words left behind by its previous inhabitants are in many languages: “Arabic, Urdu, Tagalog, Malayalam, French, Hindi, English…messages from one woman to another or to someone far away.” If convicted, Sara knows, she could hang. But in this moment, the writing on the walls comforts her. She is “cradled by thousands of writing hands, their fear blending with [hers], outsiders in a closed country.”

Your novel, An Unlasting Home, intersperses the stories of five women: Sara, awaiting trial for telling her Kuwait University students God is dead; her maternal grandmother, Lulwa; her paternal grandmother, Yasmine; her mother, Noura; and her ayah, Maria. The novel doesn’t make the source of the stories explicit — only Sara’s sections are told in first person, and she may or may not be the third-person narrator of the other women’s stories, though elsewhere you have written, “An Unlasting Home is, in many ways, a repository of women’s stories collected by Sara.” Whatever their source, these histories belong to Sara and come from her; they make her the person she is.

I understand the scarcity of written histories. I was born the same year as fictional Sara (1971) on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; my father and grandparents had no birth certificates to tell us when they were born. I know how difficult and how essential it is to wrap our arms around the stories of the people who came before us, especially the women.

The student who accuses Sara of blasphemy is also a woman. Sara doesn’t even know what she looks like because she wears a veil to class. At home and awaiting trial, Sara at first keeps her predicament secret from those closest to her: her brother, Karim, in California; her partner, Karl, in Norway; and Maria, who continues to work for Sara, though at eightysomething and fortysomething, they are no longer nanny and ward.

Meanwhile, we learn Sara’s family history: How Lulwa, born in Kuwait City, and Yasmine, born in Lebanon, each fell in love with young men. How Lulwa’s husband, of a Kuwaiti mercantile family that plied the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, took her to his family’s estate in Poona, India, where Noura was born. How Yasmine made her way to Basra, Iraq, and gave up her dreams of teaching and writing to marry a pasha’s son, who later betrayed her by marrying a second wife.

Eventually, Lulwa’s and Yasmine’s husbands are drawn to the booming Kuwait of the 1950s. Once a coastal town of mud huts, pearl diving, and ships caught between the Ottomans and the British, it hurls toward independence in the mid-twentieth century. High-rises and highways take over the landscape, and families move out of crowded neighborhoods and into walled villas. Oil and banking replace mercantilism and the fruits of the sea, and migrants like Maria arrive to help build the new nation — by raising skyscrapers or children. I recognize this rapid pace of change — the way a place can, in just a few decades, transform so much that its older version is lost to memory and history.

You tell those lost stories through scenes that function like miniature paintings within the grand sweep of history. In the 1940s, baby Noura is scooped up by a monkey in Poona, India, and then rescued from him, with a bedsheet and a banana, by her Kuwaiti father and the women of the household. But that Kuwaiti-Indian life is lost by the late 1970s, when Noura’s children, growing up in Kuwait, “ramble in the ditches of what would become a major eight-lane divided highway.”

Intertwining narratives are a common device in contemporary English-language novels. And stories-within-stories is a classic Middle Eastern format with roots much deeper than The Arabian Nights. Your book marries these traditions and implodes them. You tell an acrostic story in a frame story, nesting-doll stories within braided stories. The five family trees that open the book are also stories. And the map covered in arrows and names, showing characters’ journeys across the Middle East and the world — when I trace my finger along the arrows, I feel the characters’ movements.

In your book, matrilineage is a path to knowing the past, and names literally connect Sara to her foremothers in the section headings:

S
L u l w a
r
Y a s m i n e

S
N o u r a
r
M a r i a

I see how this is a riff on and a rift from the traditions of the past. My father passed on family history by teaching me to memorize my name the Arab way, five generations of patriarchs back:

Men take part in Sara’s stories — fathers, brothers, lovers, friends, Sara’s lawyer — but they aren’t the path she traces. In your book, every daughter’s story is also her mother’s story. In a pivotal family tale, Lulwa’s mother, Sheikha, lures her away from India and back to Kuwait City because Lulwa’s father is dying. (This is decades before Lulwa and her husband return to Kuwait for good.) When Sheikha’s husband, who abused her throughout their marriage, finally dies, she locks her daughter in the house for seven years. Lulwa stays, ignoring her mother’s abuse because she needs her mother, and she needs to be a good daughter if she wants to free herself. Finally, her mother gives up, opens the front door, and locks herself in a room, leaving Lulwa free at last to return to her husband in India.

I catch an echo of this story years later, when Sara is held captive in her mother’s house. After Noura dies in 2001, Sara stays in Kuwait, teaching and running her mother’s bookstore, living in the home her parents built, providing sponsorship to Maria so that she can remain in the country, where her children and grandchildren now live. When the state accuses Sara of blasphemy, she’s barred from travel until her trial and spends her days in her childhood home, swimming in the indoor pool, isolated.

When Sara finally stands trial, the front door of Kuwait opens for her, and she has a decision to make: Will she stay in a country that would accuse her of blasphemy?

Whatever she decides, she will carry with her the stories that trace her lineage, a heritage of possibilities in opposition: staying or going, here or there, return or exile. She will hold so much history alongside her present, the contents of her own life alongside the lives of those who came before.