At the beginning of America's occupation of Iraq, 15 years after leaving Baghdad, Zeina returns to her war-torn homeland as an interpreter for the US Army where she finds herself torn by conflicting allegiances. Her formidable grandmother, the only family member that Zeina believes she has in Iraq, gravely disapproves of her granddaughter's actions. Whilst in Baghdad, Zeina meets Haider and Muhaymin, two 'brothers' she knows nothing of. When she falls deeply in love with Muhaymin, a militant in the Al Mehdi Army, she begins to question all her values.

Braiding together past and present, Every House Needs a Balcony tells the story of a young Jewish girl—a child of Romanian immigrants—who lives with her family in the poverty-stricken heart of 1950s Haifa, Israel. Eight-year-old Rina, her older sister, and their parents inhabit a cramped apartment with a narrow balcony that becomes an intimate shared stage on which the joys and dramas of the building's daily life are played out. It is also a vantage point from which Rina witnesses the emergence of a strange new country, born from the ashes of World War II. Later, after years of living abroad with her wealthy Spanish husband in Barcelona, Rina, longing for the simple life she has missed, returns to the Haifa of her boisterous youth, a move that soothes her soul but ultimately endangers her marriage.

Beautifully told, rich with questions of identity, love, and survival, Every House Needs a Balcony is an unforgettable social and historical portrait of a neighborhood and a nation. Steeped in the colors and smells, laughter and tears, of Rina Frank's own childhood memories, it is a heartbreaking tale about the deepest meanings of home.

A chance encounter at Kennedy Airport with her ex-husband, Saliou Wade, takes Magdalene and their now adult daughter, Khadi, on a visit to him and his new family in Senegal. Magdalene is understandably nervous about the return, remembering the pain of the mutual cultural incomprehension—she is a St Lucian—that ended the marriage almost twenty years before; but Khadi refuses to go without her. In Senegal, whilst the now cosmopolitan Saliou appears to exist comfortably in multiple worlds, there are more complex relationships to manage with members of his large extended family. But the sensitivities are not merely social and cultural. A visit Khadi and her half-sister Maimouna make to the slave port of Gorée has consequences that lay bare unfinished business between West Indians and Africans, between Magdalene and Saliou, and Khadi and her parents. And when Khadi and Hassim, Saliou's brother-in-law, are drawn together, those looking on must wonder whether history will repeat itself.