Bester Wrook

A wondrously intimate, funny, philosophical debut novel about an Arab American woman who re-creates her adolescent hometown in The Sims to understand the place and time that made her

“Bester Wrook is weirdly existential and about all of life and I loved it.” —Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour and How Should a Person Be?

When her family moved to the northeastern U.S. suburb of Bester Wrook in the mid-2000s, our protagonist looked to her new classmates, immigrant parents, reclusive older brother, and teen oracle Hannah Montana for clues about how the world really works. Now an adult, she reopens the life simulation game from her youth to build a neighborhood modeled on the town where she came of age.

Her Sims have much in common with the people she remembers and the girl she was. Luckily for the Sims, none of them are Palestinian-Lebanese-Irish-American tweens growing up during the war on terror. Still, they have afflictions, needs, and ambitions—to perfect their lobster thermidor, or play the violin well, or fall in love—which they do, and more, as they’re nurtured, tested, and observed by their searching creator.

As she rearranges the furniture of her past and recalls her formative years, she struggles to order her inner, outer, and virtual worlds, and her existential questions deepen and multiply. Who gets to author a girl’s childhood: her parents, her country, or herself? While she works to satisfy the demands of characters within and beyond the game, the lines between these worlds become increasingly porous, and she is visited again by the wish she once held above all others: to Grow Up Well.

Bester Wrook is a marvel, exploring profound questions of alienation, assimilation, and self-determination—and the absurdities of youth and suburbia—with a playful, elastic intelligence that introduces Nora Obeid as a major new talent.