Crescent

You can smell the spices in the food, hear the sultry twang of the Middle Eastern music and feel the intensity of the coffee in this thoughtful, alluring and incredibly timely story. Diana Abu-Jaber's Crescent (W.W. Norton, $13.95) is a love story, cleverly told. Sirine is a chef at a Lebanese restaurant in Los Angeles - the center of the Middle Eastern community and second home to the staff of the Middle Eastern department from the local university. A beautiful blond haired, green-eyed half-Iraqi, half-American woman, Sirine finds herself discovering love on many levels. Falling in love with the Iraqi professor Hanif (Han), loving the stories that her uncle tells, falling in love with the culture of her father, uncle, lover and the world of the Middle East.

Jaber weaves Sirine's life story and subsequent love story in with just one of many stories that her uncle tells her to clarify life issues. Through weaving the two stories, Jaber is almost using a literary form of alliteration to demonstrate the difference between American and Middle Eastern cultures. The Middle Eastern culture relying on rich symbolism in its most traditional literature and Jaber uses the uncle's tale to bring the same sense of symbolism and mysticism to the very real story of Sirine and Han's blossoming love. Jaber also uses Sirine's skills as a chef to bring the culture of the Middle East to the reader through sumptuously detailed descriptions of the food that Sirine serves to her café customers, her uncle, extended family and lover.

Through the use of food and literature - both ways to bridge cultures - Jaber is also able to bring us a powerful view into a political world. Han is an Iraqi who feels he cannot return to his country. He longs to return to the country he so loves and be, once again, in the midst of a loving family. Having left just as Hussein comes to power, and knowing that his sister died a political prisoner, he knows that it is simply suicidal to return. Through the professors at the school, the café regulars and Sirine's extended yet adoptive family, Jaber demonstrates the melting pot of the Middle East while at the same time shaping, through the similarities of the different countries, a view of the Middle East as a culture. She brings us the pain, the doubt, the longing for a world as remembered before the various conflicts between Iran, Iraq, the United States and various countries and Palestine and Israel.

Jaber is masterful. Crescent is sultry, smelling of cinnamon and cardamom and jasmine and laden with the feel of another culture and the life of exile. At the end, the reader feels like perhaps they took a detour and visited the Middle East while sipping a strong, dark coffee and enjoying a triangle of baklava.

Crescent is a perfect fit with Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (Riverhead, $14) with Tamim Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (Picador; $13) and Tony Horwitz's Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia (Plume; $15) for anyone who wants to not only read great books but get a sense of the culture of the middle east.