What are your future plans? Are you planning to write any more fiction addressing other issues?

I’m currently finishing my next book. I wrote the Nora-Ahmed story from Nora’s POV. Whereas that story was but a section in The Almond Tree, in my new book, it is the whole book. That may have something to do with what love means to a woman and what it means to a man. Although Nora and Ahmed have similar political views, the way she sees their story and the way Ahmed saw it are so radically different. I find that reflects the conflict, the same situation, two radically different interpretations. Perception is stronger than reality. Also it’s a social commentary about the most pressing issues facing Americans. The Almond Tree was about those issues faced by Palestinians. I wrote The Almond Tree in more of a Khaled Hosseini style because that style captured the reality as I saw it between the Palestinians and Israelis. In the new book, I was trying to capture what it was like for me to come from a world like the one described in The Almond Tree and then go to college at Harvard. Nora is who I wished I could have been, but I use her to capture American reality through the eyes of someone who lived in Jerusalem. Also I wanted to show what she saw when she was in Israel. The only way I could do this was to use a Twilight/Fifty Shades type of style and to write in present tense.