Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir, Tareq Baconi

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Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir
by Tareq Baconi (Hardcover – November 4, 2025)

LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
“I am forever changed after reading this book.” — Javier Zamora, author of Solito

From acclaimed Palestinian scholar Tareq Baconi comes a searing, tender memoir about political and queer awakening, forbidden love, and the quest for belonging across generations and borders.

Both intimate and expansive, Fire in Every Direction traces the story of a family—and a self—shaped by exile, silence, and resilience. Beginning with his grandmother’s flight from Haifa in 1948 and his mother’s activism during Lebanon’s civil war, Baconi weaves a multi-generational portrait of displacement that reverberates through his own life as a queer man navigating identity, loss, and desire.

Growing up in Amman, Tareq feels trapped by the weight of history and expectation, and by the unspoken truth of his love for his childhood friend, Ramzi. When he relocates to London for college, he begins to explore the freedoms of queer life abroad, even as he is haunted by the political realities he has left behind. As wars erupt and old wounds reopen, Tareq must reckon with what it means to belong to multiple worlds and none—to live between exile and return, between silence and voice.

Balancing humor and heartbreak, Fire in Every Direction is a work of profound honesty and beauty. It is a story about how identity is forged in the fires of history, how love becomes an act of resistance, and how returning home can mean rediscovering one’s voice.