Ordinary Chaos of Being Human

True stories. Soul-baring moments. No apologies.

Two schoolgirls in Yemen skip class, and wander into a yellow circus tent, empty except for one rusty cage. A Jordanian man spends a maddening summer in his sweaty apartment cursing his loud, ignorant neighbours. A woman in Beirut is heartsick, waiting for her kidnapped parrot to return. A young Bangladeshi-American argues with her father about her choice of boyfriend. A lady discovers the secret about the Pakistani neighbour who had stolen her birthday gifts. And an Iraqi soldier pines for an American journalist obsessed with someone else.

This ambitious collection is a four-year quest to find diverse stories from many Muslim worlds that build bridges between each of us, through intimate, and incredibly human experiences of love, loss, laughter and everything in between.