They All Say I Love You

With a quiet humour, They All Say I Love You gets under the skin of five middle-aged, middle class Arab intellectuals living in Canada and America, following the twists and turns of their love lives as they question their choices in life and reflect on (un)faithfulness in romantic relationships. They meet on various forms of transport – a train, a plane and on the motorway – and their stories intersect and mirror each other. The reader experiences each character both as a first-person narrator and a third person figure in another character’s story, creating a complex reality with multiple perspectives. As exiles, the protagonists all grapple with issues of language, identity and assimilation, and remain connected to the lands of their birth through annual visits, painful memories of past trauma or political engagement.