The Uproar

By (author) Dimechkie Karim
Short description/annotation:
A "raw, tensely plotted, profound high-wire act of a book" (Téa Obreht) on the intricacies of marriage, class, and race, and just how far one man will go to protect his family-and himself
Description:

A "raw, tensely plotted, profound high-wire act of a book" (Téa Obreht) on the intricacies of marriage, class, and race, and just how far one man will go to protect his family-and himself.

Sharif is a good person. He knows that he is good because he''s aware of the privilege that he holds as a white man. He knows he is good because he chose to be a social worker at a nonprofit in Brooklyn, scraping by in New York City. And he knows he is good because his wife, Adjoua, a progressive Black novelist, has always said so.

But Sharif''s goodness doesn''t protect him and Adjoua against bad luck. In an emergency, when they must find a new home for their beloved, unruly, giant dog before the imminent birth of their immunocompromised daughter, a desperate Sharif leaves Judy in the care of Emmanuel, a Haitian immigrant and Sharif''s social services client.

When Emmanuel agrees to take the dog, it is only a momentary relief. What begins as a dispute between the young couple and Emmanuel''s teenage son soon draws both families into a maelstrom of unpredictable conflict. As tempers flare into a public uproar, escalating to social media and taken up by law enforcement, the cracks in Sharif and Adjoua''s marriage are exposed and they''re forced to question everything they thought about race, empathy, and if Sharif was ever good in the first place. Immersive and propulsive, The Uproar is the book we need to understand the moment we live in now.

Biographical note:
Karim Dimechkie''s first novel, Lifted by the Great Nothing (Bloomsbury), was praised by NPR, the PEN/Hemingway Foundation, and Oprah.com. Karim was a Fellow of the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, The Anderson Center for the Arts, and the UCROSS Foundation. His writing can be found in the New York Times, TheSaint Ann''s Review, and Empirical Magazine''s Best of Anthology. Like the protagonist of The Uproar, Karim spent over five years working in New York City''s social services in Flatbush, Brooklyn while writing and acting as MFA Thesis Advisor at Columbia University. He now lives between London and New York with his wife and son.