Every Exit Brings you Home is a 2026 novel by Naeem Murr about Jamal "Jack" Shaban, a Gazan immigrant and flight attendant in Chicago, who navigates his complex life as the president of his condo association while grappling with his past, his marriage, and his identity. Set during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the story uses the microcosm of his building to explore themes of homeland, exile, love, loss, and the search for home, weaving together present-day conflicts with flashbacks to violence in 1980s Gaza.

presented by Santa Fe Asso Bookgroup 4pm

The first biography of Jack D. Rittenhouse, the pioneering twentieth-century writer, printer, publisher, Western historian, antiquarian bookman, advertising executive, and chronicler of the golden age of Route 66 was born in 1912 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rittenhouse had an insatiable curiosity and a penchant for adventure, Farmer explains. After dropping out of college during the Great Depression, he rode the rails to New York City, where he got a job as a bookseller. By 23, Rittenhouse was working in the mail room at Knopf, where he learned the ropes of advertising and marketing. Drawn to the history of the American West, he began collecting books on the region and founded Stagecoach Press in 1946, through which he published a popular guidebook to Highway 66, among other titles. Rittenhouse oversaw every aspect of the publication process at Stagecoach, from acquisitions to design and printing. Ever the book collector, he began publishing the newsletter New Mexico Book News, which "helped lay the foundation for a vibrant statewide renaissance of the New Mexico book community." In 1968, he became an editor at the University Press of New Mexico, where he established a successful reprint series of books by Larry McMurtry, Mary Austin, and others. Complete with admiring reflections and lively prose, this is a solid tribute to a celebrated bookman.

One of the best-reviewed books of the year, a raw and deeply moving memoir that “pulses with compassion and moral outrage” (The Wall Street Journal) from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces her complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

In this, her first work of memoir, Arundhati Roy writes, “Perhaps even more than a daughter mourning the passing of her mother, I mourn her as a writer who has lost her most enthralling subject.”