Too Soon

For readers of Pachinko and Queenie, a funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut that explores exile, ambition, and hope across three generations of Palestinian American women.Arabella gets an unexpected chance at love when she’s thrust into a conflict and history she’s tried to avoid all her life. Zoya is playing matchmaker for her last unmarried granddaughter and stirring up buried memories. Naya is keeping a secret from her children that will change all their lives. Thirty-five-year-old Arabella, a New York theatre director whose dating and career prospects are drying up, is offered an opportunity to direct a risqué cross-dressing interpretation of a Shakespeare classic—that might garner international attention—in the West Bank. Her mother, Naya, and grandmother, Zoya, hatch a plot to match her with Aziz, a Palestinian American doctor volunteering in Gaza. Arabella agrees to meet Aziz, since her growing feelings for Yoav, a celebrated Israeli American theatre designer, seem destined for disaster... With biting hilarity, Too Soon introduces us to a trio of bold and unforgettable voices. This dramatic saga follows one family’s epic journey fleeing war-torn Jaffa in 1948, chasing the American Dream in Detroit and San Francisco in the sixties and seventies, hustling in the New York theatre scene post-9/11, and daring to stage a show in Palestine in 2012. Upon learning one of them is living on borrowed time, the three women fight to live, make art, and love on their own terms. A funny, sexy, and heart-wrenching literary debut, Too Soon illuminates our shared history and asks, how can we set ourselves free?

“Too Soon is about what it means to leave home, what it means to return home, and what happens when home is an elusive concept. Sharp, propulsive, and irreverent, this story is profound without ever becoming ponderous—and I haven’t been this excited about a debut novel in a long time.” —Rebecca Makkai, author of I Have Some Questions for You, “Shamieh’s tone—present throughout, but strongest in Arabella’s sections—is confiding and chatty, a Carrie Bradshaw if Carrie had to worry about getting detained at Ben Gurion Airport by Israeli guards for eight hours. But this book isn’t fluffy: Its ethically complex characters carry heavy weights. Shamieh refuses easy moral lessons, aiming for complexity and nuance with a light, voicey touch.” —Kirkus Reviews, “Too Soon braids the lives of three passionate Palestinian women as they move through a turbulent century. From a sparkling harborside home in Jaffa in the forties, to the slums of Detroit in the sixties and the stages of contemporary New York theater, each generation must contend with patriarchy within her community and prejudice from outside it. A deft, honest novel that refuses to shun complexity as it explores the costs of love and motherhood.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, “Too Soon is a multi-generational tale of ambition, war, and reinvention. Its fierce and witty narrators are women, grandmother, mother, and daughter, struggling to plot lives and destinies beyond history’s confines. History here is nations at war; history is embattled families; history is expecting wives and daughters to put marriage before art and duty before desire. Arabella, the granddaughter, is a theatre director who stages Shakespeare’s tragedies as if they were comedies and vice versa. This is exactly what Shamieh does in this book. Simplicities disappear. New interpretations and intricacies emerge. A writer outwits the confines of history.” —Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, author of Constructing a Nervous System, “Too Soon is a deeply moving and humorous novel about the Palestinian and Palestinian American experience. Spanning decades and moving back and forth through time, Shamieh’s story explores the lives of three generations of Palestinian women. Through the voices of her unforgettable characters, Shamieh dramatizes a wide range of complex themes, including identity, the meaning of home, war, romance, the creation of art, and the trauma of forced displacement. An exhilarating read.” —Ghassan Zeineddine, author of Dearborn

Betty Shamieh (she/her) is a Palestinian American writer and the author of fifteen plays. She is the playwright-in-residence at the Classical Theatre of Harlem. Her six New York play premieres include the sold-out off-Broadway runs of Roar and Malvolio, a sequel to Twelfth Night, which were both New York Times Critic’s Picks. Shamieh was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and named a UNESCO Young Artist for Intercultural Dialogue. She is a founding artistic director of The Semitic Root, a collective that supports innovative theatre cocreated by Arab and Jewish Americans. A graduate of Harvard College and the Yale School of Drama, she lives with her family in San Francisco.