All My Rage: A Novel - Softcover

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Sabaa Tahir is a former newspaper editor who grew up in California's Mojave Desert at her family's eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, listening to thunderous indie rock, and playing guitar and piano badly. Her #1 New York Times bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series has been translated into more than thirty-five languages, and the first book in the series was named one of TIME's 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Tahir's most recent novel, All My Rage, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, was an instant New York Times bestseller, received eight starred reviews and won the 2022 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry. Visit Sabaa online at SabaaTahir.com and follow her on Instagram @SabaaTahir and TikTok @SabaaTahirAuthor.

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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary YA novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary YA novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds' Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.

Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him―and Juniper―forever.

When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth―and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.

From one of today’s most cherished and bestselling young adult authors comes a breathtaking novel of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness―one that’s both tragic and poignant in its tender ferocity.

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chapter 1

Misbah

June, then

Lahore, Pakistan

The clouds over Lahore were purple as a gossip’s tongue the day my mother told me I would wed.

After she delivered the news, I found my father on the veranda. He sipped a cup of tea and surveyed the storm looming above the kite-­spattered skyline.

Change her mind! I wanted to scream. Tell her I’m not ready.

Instead, I stood at his side, a child again, waiting for him to take care of me. I did not have to speak. My father looked at me, and he knew.

“Come now, little butterfly.” He turned his moth-­brown eyes to mine and patted my shoulder. “You are strong like me. You will make the best of it. And at last, you’ll be free of your mother.” He smiled, only half joking.

The monsoon rain swept over Lahore a few minutes later, sending chickens and children squawking for cover, drenching the cement floor of our home. I bent my head to the ground in prayer regardless.

Let my future husband be gentle, I thought, remembering the bruises on my cousin Amna, who married a light-­haired English businessman against her parents’ wishes.Let him be a good man.

I was eighteen. Full of fear. I should have prayed instead for a man unbroken.

chapter 2

Sal

February, now

Juniper, California

It’s 6:37 a.m. and my father doesn’t want me to know how drunk he is.

“Sal? Are you listening?”

He calls me Sal instead of Salahudin so I don’t hear the slur in his words. Hangs on to our Civic’s steering wheel like it’s going to steal his wallet and bolt.

In the ink-­black morning, all I see of Abu’s eyes are his glasses. The taillights of traffic going into school reflect off the thick square lenses. He’s had them so long that they’re hipster now. A Mojave Desert howler shakes the car—­one of those three-­day winds that rampage through your skin and colonize your ventricles. I hunch deep in my fleece, breath clouding.

“I will be there,” Abu says. “Don’t worry. Okay, Sal?”

My nickname on his lips is all wrong. It’s like by saying it, he’s trying to make me feel like he’s a friend, instead of a mess masquerading as my father.

If Ama were here, she would clear her throat and enunciate “Sa-­lah-­ud-­din,” the precise pronunciation a gentle reminder that she named me for the famous Muslim general, and I better not forget it.

“You said you’d go to the last appointment, too,” I tell Abu.

“Dr. Rothman called last night to remind me,” Abu says. “You don’t have to come, if you have the—­the writing club, or soccer.”

“Soccer season’s over. And I quit the newspaper last semester. I’ll be at the appointment. Ama’s not taking care of herself and someone needs to tell Dr. Rothman—­preferably in a coherent sentence.” I watch the words hit him, sharp little stones.

Abu guides the car to the curb in front of Juniper High. A bleached-­blond head buried in a parka materializes from the shadows of C-­hall. Ashlee. She saunters past the flagpole, through the crowds of students, and toward the Civic. The pale stretch of her legs is courageous for the twenty-­degree weather.

Also distracting.

Ashlee is close enough to the car that I can see her purple nail polish. Abu hasn’t spotted her. He and Ama never said I can’t have a girlfriend. But in the same way that giraffes are born knowing how to run, I was born with the innate understanding that having a girlfriend while still living with my parents is verboten.

Abu digs his fingers into his eyes. His glasses have carved a shiny red dent on his nose. He slept in them last night on the recliner. Ama was too tired to notice.

Or she didn’t want to notice.

“Putar—­” Son.

Ashlee knocks on the window. Her parka is unzipped enough to show the insubstantial welcome to tatooine shirt beneath. She must be freezing.

Two years ago Abu’s eyebrows would have been in his hair. He’d have said“Who is this, Putar?” His silence feels more brutal, like glass shattering in my head.

“How will you get to the hospital?” Abu asks. “Should I pick you up?”

“Just get Ama there,” I say. “I’ll find a ride.”

“Okay, but text me if—­”

“My cell’s not working.” Because you actually have to pay the phone company, Abu. The one thing he’s in charge of and still can’t do. It’s usually Ama hunched over stacks of bills, asking the electric company, the hospital, the cable company if we can pay in installments. Muttering “ullu de pathay”—­sons of owls—­when they say no.

I lean toward him, take a shallow sniff, and almost gag. It’s like he took a bath in Old Crow and then threw on some more as aftershave.

“I’ll see you at three,” I say. “Take a shower before she wakes up. She’ll smell it on you.”

Neither of us says that it doesn’t matter. That even if Ama smells the liquor, she would never say anything about it. Before Abu responds, I’m out, grabbing my tattered journal from where it fell out of my back pocket. Slamming the car door, eyes watering from the cold.

Ashlee tucks herself under my arm. Breathe. Five seconds in. Seven seconds out. If she feels my body tense up, she doesn’t let on.

“Warm me up.” Ashlee pulls me down for a kiss, and the ash of her morning cigarette fills my nostrils.Five seconds in. Seven seconds out. Cars honk. A door thuds nearby and for a moment, I think it is Abu. I think I will feel the weight of his disapproval.Have some tamiz, Putar. I see it in my head. I wish for it.

But when I break from Ashlee, the Civic’s blinker is on and he’s pulling into traffic.

If Noor was here instead of Ashlee, she’d have side-­eyed me and handed me her phone.Not everyone has a dad, jerk. Call him and eat crow. Awk, awk.

She’s not here, though. Noor and I haven’t spoken for months.

Ashlee steers me toward campus, and launches into a story about her two-­year-­old daughter, Kaya. Her words swim into each other, and there’s a glassiness to her eyes that reminds me of Abu at the end of a long day.

I pull away. I met Ashlee junior year, after Ama got sick and I dropped most of my honors classes for regular curriculum. Last fall, after the Fight between Noor and me, I spent a lot of time alone. I could have hung out with the guys on my soccer team, but I hated how many of them threw around words like “raghead” and “bitch” and “Apu.”

Ashlee had just broken up with her girlfriend and started coming to my games, waiting for me in her old black Mustang with its primered hood. We’d shoot the shit. One day, to my surprise, she asked me out.

I knew it would be a disaster. But at least it would be a disaster I chose.

She calls me her boyfriend, even though we’ve only been together two months. It took me three weeks to even work up the nerve to kiss her. But when she’s not high, we laugh and talk about Star Wars or Saga or this showCrown of Fates we both love. I don’t think about Ama so much. Or the motel. Or Noor.

“MR. MALIK.” Principal Ernst, a bowling pin of a man with a nose like a bruised...