Named by her grandfather after "the Divine" Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Nour El-Din grows up in Beirut against the fraught background of civil war. Young Sarah finds pleasure in the everyday—her first cigarette, her first kiss, or foiling her tight-lipped stepmother—though after two failed marriages, the loss of her son, the death of one sister and the imprisonment of another, she recognizes the fragility of life, and begins to tell her story. But this story is not so easy to tell, and Sarah starts over again and again; Rabih Alameddine gives us a novel told entirely in first chapters, as Sarah struggles to come to terms with her past.

"Sarah is wonderful, irresistibly unique, funny … and the structure is literary genius, humorously naughty in its satire, and perfect to the notion of someone reinventing and revising herself."—Amy Tan