Sami, the main character of Silverworld, walked into my imagination about five years ago. Like me, Sami is a child of an immigrant parent, someone who lives between cultures, between an American identity and a sense of an elusive—almost magical—old world.

On that warm spring afternoon, I was visiting my family’s village outside Amman, Jordan, when I was stopped and “recognized” on the street by a total stranger, an elderly Arab man, who walked up to me and said, “Anissa?” That was my grandmother’s name. This moment felt deeply mysterious to me: I’d never met my grandmother.

Anissa had lived in another country, years before I was born, yet I couldn’t help wishing for a magical door that would let us find each other. Silverworld is, in part, my attempt to write that door into being, to peer between generations, countries, and realities.

Stories were Anissa’s hedge against loneliness and isolation. She’d left Nazareth as a young girl. In her adopted country of Jordan, books became her refuge. She collected them, gradually amassing a library in her home. If anyone came to visit, my uncles said, Anissa would ask for a book; and she sent her guests home with books. I believe the presence of stories gave her a sense of comfort; the continuity of narrative became another kind of homeland.

My father, who immigrated to America, continued his mother’s literary tradition, weaving stories for his American children about his travels around the world. He’d always assumed that his time in the States would be temporary and he tried to relocate our family to Jordan more than once. But each time he returned to his native country, he became restless and discontented: within a few months, we’d be on our way back to New York again.

I inherited a touch of this same restlessness and I sometimes refer to myself as a genetic nomad: I’ve traveled through much of the Middle East, to Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Dubai, the West Bank, and the UAE. As an adult, I lived in Jordan for a year, trying it on for myself, trying to figure out where in the world to call home. Like my grandmother, I’ve come to believe that stories can offer an important homeland.

There’s a lot of me in my character Sami—both of us torn between identities. Silverworld is the land that reflects the known world, just as, for so many of us in this country, the children of immigrants, we live between the present and the magic of faraway places and times. Up until now, I’ve written books, like my novel Crescent, and memoirs, like The Language of Baklava, geared toward adults. But with the birth of my daughter ten years ago, I began to feel the need to tell another kind of story. This is the book that I wish I’d had when I was her age—a journey through the experience of being in between and a celebration of the power of self-acceptance.

I hope you’ll find something to connect to here as well. As book lovers, you have one of the greatest magical powers of all—the ability to travel to different worlds and to share them with others. Thank you for being my heroes.