THE GREEN BARN is a novel set across several decades in late-twentieth-century Michigan. It’s a queer coming-of-age story about family, first loves, and the long road to becoming yourself.
It’s the late 1960s. Seven-year-old Samad Bishara is given a pony he doesn’t want at the family’s farm in northern Michigan. Sam is the youngest son of a large Lebanese-American family in Detroit and is expected to follow in his brothers’ footsteps.
At thirteen, a summer friendship with a neighbor farm boy awakens desires Sam can barely understand. When he tries to confide in his mother, Rose, her reaction drives him underground. He discovers the Pipeline, an anonymous Detroit phone line for hookups, and a string of encounters follow that leave him emptier than before.
There are others who shape him—a brother, a best friend, a teacher—and eventually Danny, the love he’s always wanted. But at the center of everything is Rose. By the time Sam is in his twenties, his relationship with his mother has become a cold war fought in kitchens and across dinner tables, between who Sam is and who Rose wants him to be.
Set in a vanishing America before seat belts and cell phones, THE GREEN BARN is a story of longing and belonging, of growing up gay in a first-generation immigrant family, and of finding peace in a world where everyone is simply trying to be themselves.