Intimate Relations with Strangers

A powerful debut novel that blends time travel, fantasy, and mystery to portray a love story set in a post-9/11 America. Set in a future where the threat of terrorism has seeped into everything, an American soldier finds himself at the vanguard of America's latest war. After a terrorist attack on the White House, America invades an African country in the Sahara. In the desert, the soldier begins to realize that memory itself can be used as a form of terrorism. Years later, as a soldier in the war, he finds himself thinking a woman who he isn’t entirely sure is real, who had once miraculously appeared when he was growing up and told him of an impossible paradise. He yearns for both the woman and that paradise. In the Sahara, he sees horrors that seem to be the work of demons. After a year of war, his mind and soul are on the verge of collapse; by the time he sees the woman from his childhood marching through the desert, he has no choice but to surrender to his fantasies. In a world devastated by war and terrorism, only she gives him hope. When she again disappears, he is ready to move heaven and earth to find her. However, it is a quest that seems to have consequences for both his soul and America's. Intimate Relations with Strangers explores the nature of reality, war, and love in such a way that “readers will remember this powerful, fable-like work of protest long after they’ve turned the last page” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).