Bester Wrook

**A wondrously intimate, funny, philosophical debut novel about an Arab American girl coming of age in the 2000s who becomes obsessed with The Sims, blurring the lines between her characters' desires and her own reality “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?** It's the mid-2000s, and our protagonist’s family has just moved to a northeastern U.S. suburb. As she navigates the social and emotional trials of adolescence—observing her new classmates, immigrant parents, reclusive older brother, and teen oracle Hannah Montana for clues about how the world really works—she becomes increasingly engrossed in the revelatory alternate reality she has built on the family computer in the popular life simulation game The Sims. Our protagonist has much in common with her Sims. Luckily for the Sims, none of them are Palestinian-Lebanese-Irish-American tweens during the early years of the War on Terror. Still, they have afflictions, needs, and aspirations—to perfect their Lobster Thermidor, for instance, or play the violin well, or fall in love—which they do, and more, in the simulated village of Bester Wrook, where they're nurtured, tested, and observed by their curious young creator. As time passes and life becomes more complex, our narrator struggles to order her inner, outer, and virtual worlds, and her existential questions deepen and multiply. While she works to satisfy the demands of the families, neighbors, and friends within and beyond the game, the lines between them become increasingly porous, the wants and needs ever-expanding. The only constant? A wish 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 in fiction.