“The narrator of Always Coca-Cola, Abeer Ward (fragrant rose, in Arabic), daughter of a conservative family, admits wryly that her name is also the name of her father’s flower shop. Abeer’s bedroom window is filled by a view of a Coca-Cola sign featuring the image of her sexually adventurous friend, Jana. From the novel’s opening paragraph—“When my mother was pregnant with me, she had only one craving. That craving was for Coca-Cola”—first-time novelist Alexandra Chreiteh asks us to see, with wonder, humor, and dismay, how inextricably confused naming and desire, identity and branding are. The names—and the novel’s edgy, cynical humor—might be recognizable across languages, but Chreiteh’s novel is first and foremost an exploration of a specific Lebanese milieu. Critics in Lebanon have called the novel “an electric shock.”

?Alexandra Chreiteh is pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale University. 

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Michelle Hartman is a professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University and literary translator of fiction, based in Montreal. She has written extensively on women’s writing and the politics of language use and translation and literary solidarities. She is the translator of several works from Arabic, including Radwa Ashour’s memoir The Journey, Iman Humaydan’s novels Wild Mulberries and Other Lives, Jana Elhassan’s IPAF shortlisted novels The Ninety-Ninth Floor and All the Women Inside Me as well as Alexandra Chreiteh’s novels Always Coca Cola and Ali and His Russian Mother.

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