CALL ME ZEBRA

A novel following a feisty heroine’s quest to reclaim her past through the power of literature—even as she navigates the murkier mystery of love.

• Winner of the 2019 Pen/Faulkner Award

• Winner of the 2019 John Gardner Award

• Long-listed for the Pen Open Book Award

• An Amazon Best Book of the Year

• A Publishers Weekly Bestseller

• Named a best book of the year by over twenty publications.

Most Anticipated from: Entertainment Weekly, Boston Globe, Harper's Bazaar, Nylon, Fast Company, Bitch, The Millions, Bustle, Electric Literature, Hello Giggles, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Shondaland, Publishers Weekly, and Read It Forward

Call Me Zebra’s International Editions

Praise for Call Me Zebra

“Funny and astute, this novel follows a woman named Zebra, who descends from a line of autodidact philosophers. Her family fled Iran during the war with Iraq. Her mother was killed by a collapsing building. She and her father journeyed through Kurdistan, Turkey and Spain, eventually settling in exile in New York. “Trust nobody,” her father warns, “and love nothing except literature.”

After her father dies, she sets out to reverse her many exiles, to locate herself in history, and to seek vengeance. Literature, she insists, is the only map and companion she needs. But, when she falls for a man, she is forced to look up from her books and confront the present.” — Nadia Owusu, The Guardian, “Top 10 Book about Roots”

"Ferociously intelligent....With intricacy and humor, Van der Vliet Oloomi relays Zebra’s brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges." --Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review

"Van der Vliet Oloomi resists the standard redemption arc, infusing her protagonist with a darkly comic neuroticism." -The New Yorker

"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a new breed of erudite, conceptually ambitious authors...Above and beyond the sociopolitical undercurrent, Call Me Zebra is about the dead we love and communicate with each time we open a book (or access a memory).” San Francisco Chronicle

"Van der Vliet Oloomi captures the shattered identity of the refugee and the immigrant, the way that literature becomes a lifeline in exile: a movable home, a network of dissent, a genealogy beyond national borders."- LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a new breed of erudite, conceptually ambitious authors...Above and beyond the sociopolitical undercurrent, “Call Me Zebra” is about the dead we love and communicate with each time we open a book (or access a memory).”  San Francisco Chronicle 

Reviews