We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where Khan finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan beautifully illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.

Sorayya Khan is the author of three novels, Noor, Five Queens Road and City of Spieswhich received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. She was the recipient of a US Fulbright Award to conduct research in Pakistan and Bangladesh for her novels. She received a Malahat Review Novella Prize and is a recipient of a Constance Saltonstall Artist Grant, which took her to Banda Aceh, Indonesia on a project interviewing tsunami survivors. Her work has appeared in multiple publications including Guernica, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Journal of Narrative Politics. She is the daughter of a Pakistani father and a Dutch mother, was born in Europe, grew up in Pakistan, and now lives in New York with her family.