alec michod

A madcap novel about the search for home, hijacked by three narrators caught up in a dangerous web of betrayal, deceit, and absurdity.

Written with blistering comic brio and unexpected stylistic jujitsu, Alec Michod’s lunatic new novel probes the plight of personality in a fragmented world besieged by violence, terror, and lost love.

In Dubai, an enterprising young Afghan businessman is looking for a new wife online. But when his father, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, tracks him down, he will be forced to confront the violent past he thought he had left behind in his homeland. Will he succumb to his father’s tyranny or fight to make his own way in the world?

Meanwhile, an American expat living in Buenos Aires is abducted, mistaken for a famous war reporter. The captor—heavily tattooed, evidently a member of the ruthless Vory V Zakone—has one demand: write my biography. If the American doesn’t submit, his wife will be tortured and killed. But as they embark on a trip to Istanbul and eventually Moscow, dodging assassins’ bullets, it becomes apparent that the mobster isn’t who he professes to be.

When a beautiful young Olympic snowboarder is found murdered under a bridge in Berlin, the fates of these men become inextricably linked. What was the terrorist’s son doing at the scene of the crime? Will the war reporter, in town to promote the German translation of his latest opus, help solve the mystery? And what does love have to do with it, anyway?

Homeland Insecurities subverts and challenges the expectations of the contemporary novel. Using borrowed forms like email, blogs, and the true-crime memoir, three unusual—and unforgettable—narrators take us on a wild ride across continents and ultimately into the heart of a very desperate darkness.