Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin

Acclaimed author Diana Abu-Jaber will read from and sign copies of her just-released novel Origin (W.W. Norton) on Wednesday, June 27, at 7 pm at Talking Leaves…Books, 3158 Main Street, as part of her national tour. Best known for her culinary memoir The Language of Baklava, a vibrant and humorous immigrant coming of age story featuring her food-obsessed Jordanian father and lots of recipes, Abu-Jaber here crafts a compelling mystery involving the murders of several infants in Syracuse, also the setting of her memoir. This event is free and open to the public. Copies of all of Ms. Abu-Jaber’s work will be available for purchase.

Lena is a fingerprint expert at a crime lab in Syracuse, whose cold, deep winters are real enough to cause readers to seek a warm covering even in summer. Suddenly, a series of crib deaths—indistinguishable from SIDS except for the fevered testimony of one distraught mother with connections in high places—draws the attention of the police and the national media and raises the possibility of the inconceivable: could there be a serial infant murderer on the loose?

Orphaned as a child, out of place as an adult, gifted with delicate and terrifying powers of intuition, Lena finds herself playing a critical role in the case. But then there is the mystery of her own childhood to solve....Could the improbable deaths of a half-dozen babies be somehow connected to her own improbable survival?

The beauty and originality of Diana Abu-Jaber's writing are here accompanied by deft, page-turning narrative tension and atmosphere, tugging the reader to an unforgettable conclusion. Powerful and jarring, with an exquisite sense of place, Origin is both a compelling mystery and a literary achievement of the first order. Both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal gave it the rare starred review, the former calling it “gripping” and “enthralling,” while Donna Seaman in the latter says “readers seeking gorgeously rendered fiction as well as intelligent and atmospheric mysteries will find Origin extraordinary.”

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of the novels Crescent and Arabian Jazz, and of the memoir The Language of Baklava. She grew up in Syracuse and now divides her time between Portland, Oregon, and Miami, Florida.

Talking Leaves is pleased to have been chosen as a stop on the tour for this wonderful new novel.