About the novel, from the publisher:
A fingerprint expert's investigation of a series of crib deaths leads her back to the mystery of her own childhood.Among the praise for Origin:
Lena is a fingerprint expert at a crime lab in the small city of Syracuse, New York, where winters are cold and deep. 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.
"With prose as cool as a razor yet as wildly impressionistic as a fever dream, Diana Abu-Jaber takes us deeply into Lena Dawson and her search for a killer that must first begin in the lost forest of her own psyche. Origin is a gripping exploration of the elusive nature of identity and one's own remembered past, the innocent and guilty alike. This is a superbly written and utterly compelling novel!"Read an excerpt from Origin, and learn more about the writer and her work at Diana Abu-Jaber's website.
--Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog
“With the narrator, Lena Dawson, we get someone entirely new, a hybrid of forensic science and animal instinct. Here’s a brilliant protagonist who can trust her intuition when she reaches the limits of her professional training.”
--Chuck Palahniuk, author of Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey and Fight Club
“A dark, noirish literary mystery with an entirely unique detective-heroine. The characters stayed with me long after I had finished the book. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything like it, which alone is reason to celebrate.”
--Anita Shreve, author of Body Surfing and A Wedding in December
"Abu-Jaber, who dealt with Arab-American themes in her earlier novels, Crescent and Arabian Jazz, shows her versatility in this gripping contemporary thriller. A spike in the number of local SIDS deaths piques the interest of Lena Dawson, a fingerprint specialist at a Syracuse, N.Y., forensics lab. Is it a statistical fluke or is there a killer at work? Determined to account for the dead infants, Lena joins the investigation, which stirs tantalizing memories from her dimly recollected early childhood. Despite her fragile mental state, Lena proves capable of surprising resolve. Her relationship with her protective ex-husband, her budding romance with a detective and her quest for her own lost past add psychological depth. Abu-Jaber's lovely nuanced prose conveys the chill of an upstate New York winter as well as it does Lena's drab existence before she was drawn into the mystery of the crib deaths. This enthralling puzzle will appeal to both crime fans and readers of literary fiction."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor, and Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She also wrote the memoir, The Language of Baklava.
The Page 99 Test: Origin.
--Marshal Zeringue
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