Brothers in Service: A Novel

"Soliman's stimulating novel delves into such challenging and topical issues as the damaging nature of the media, generational trauma, and the commodification of tragedy . . . A thought-provoking work." — Kirkus Reviews

"A pensive, quietly devastating novel that examines how a single national trauma reverberates through a family across three generations . . . Soliman animates the Bakari family with striking realism and emotional depth." — The BookLife Prize

"I was literally having a conversation this morning about how books rarely can make me cry anymore... yet here I was, wrecked, sobbing cathartically." — Jenny Hernandez, NetGalley, 5 Star Review

"I'm stunned... Even if you think you know everything about 9/11 and have heard all the stories - you haven't heard this one, and it's one that you really have to read." — Shreya North, Reedsy Discovery, 5 Star Review

"Absolutely amazing and a must-read. The characters and experiences are unforgettable and stuck with me long after I finished the last chapter." — Ellen Ross, NetGalley reviewer, 5 Star Review

A family built on service. A silence eighteen years long.

On September 11, 2001, Omar Bakari walked out of the World Trade Center covered in ash and came home to New Jersey. His twin sons answered the years that followed in opposite ways: Ali with the Constitution, Adam with a uniform — until something happened in Iraq that neither brother could speak of, and a family built on service went silent.

Now, in 2026 — as the country talks itself toward another war — Omar's grandson Elias begins asking the questions no one will answer. What he finds is not a secret but a wound: a story of what fear does to a country, what war does to the people sent to fight it, and what it costs a family to finally tell itself the truth.

Spanning a quarter century of American life, Brothers in Service is a novel of faith, inheritance, and one Muslim American family's long answer to a single September morning.

Written by a civil rights trial attorney and former newspaper columnist, Brothers in Service is about what it means to serve a country that never stopped asking you to prove you belong — and it asks the question hanging over this American moment: if a country never reckons with its last war, what stops it from walking into the next one?

For readers of Amy Waldman's The Submission, Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies, and Karan Mahajan's The Association of Small Bombs.