JEDDAH: Arab Australian novelist Yumna Kassab stakes out her new novel, “Goodbye, My Love,” in the unglamorous aftermath of an Arab woman choosing to walk away from her marriage.
Based in Sydney, she was the inaugural Parramatta Laureate in Literature in 2024-2025, which culminated in a recently published nonfiction work exploring her personal connection to Parramatta.
A high school teacher by profession, her books have been listed for prestigious literary prizes such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and the Stella Prize, among others. Her earlier works — including “The House of Youssef,” “The Lovers” and “Politica” — have marked her as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Arab Australian fiction.
Published by Ultimo Press, “Goodbye, My Love” abandons the familiar narrative arc of romantic fiction in favor of “the aftermath of what is probably not a love story at all.” (Supplied)
Published by Ultimo Press, “Goodbye, My Love” abandons the familiar narrative arc of romantic fiction in favor of “the aftermath of what is probably not a love story at all.”
It follows Amina, a woman who struggles with loss of identity and the choices and decisions that led to divorce. The first scene that Kassab wrote captures the heart of the matter.
“It’s the one where Amina and Amin are sitting at a resort at a beach and she’s watching a storm roll in,” she told Arab News. “You can see something far off that is really quite disastrous, or you really should move … and then you just watch it arrive in your life.”
She assembled the narrative from fragments written over just a few months before being physically rearranged across the floor of her writing room. “I wanted to make it clear at the very beginning that she leaves. Then we sort of work up to the leaving and then the aftermath.”
With complementary book covers designed by Mika Tabata, readers of the “more hopeful” “The Lovers” will recognize “Goodbye, My Love” as something like a shadow twin or companion novel. “Maybe the way the books go together is that they explore different aspects of close relations,” the author said.
Social expectations around divorce in the Arab community only intensify Amina’s journey. “There is this sort of universal idea that to leave a marriage or a divorce is a failure in some ways,” she said. “That it’s better, even if it’s completely terrible, to actually stay in a marriage.”
The author is suspicious of two stories our culture likes to tell about the self: that we are captains of our own fate and that we can always simply begin again. “I think a lot of the time you know the right thing to do and you don’t go do it,” she said.
Kassab brings complexities to the classic Western redemption arc trope: “Where the story ends in a lot of other books is that she’s got herself back, she’s strong, and she’s feeling great. That’s where the story is meant to end. But I don’t think that’s real. There’s a lot of sadness in this book.”
Amina’s psychological turmoil is a devastating observation for cultures — Arab, Western or otherwise — with an affinity for reinvention narratives, and it gives the novel its emotional undertow. “Even after she’s made the decision ... she’s still thinking about the past,” she said. “The older I get, the more I notice that stuff from the past starts to stay more and more.”
With an ending that left this reader feeling sorrowful, it seems what the author hopes we take instead is permission to sit with what does not resolve in life.
“It’s okay if something negative did impact your life, to not necessarily be like, ‘I should have let go of that, moved on, triumphed over adversity’,” she said. “It is actually OK to have that sadness. That is an important thing to talk about … even if you want to let it go, terrible things do linger.”
Kassab opts for ambiguity, with physical descriptions, biographical facts and place names often left vague for the reader to speculate. She traces it to oral storytelling habits she absorbed growing up in a Lebanese Australian family.
“I noticed that with family members telling a story, there are certain details that I consider important and certain details that are not important,” she said. “With a lot of English literary books, descriptions sometimes have gone to the point of it affecting the story.”
The fragmented and poetic narrative in the book also tests the limits of the English-language novel. The work inherits something closer to the storytelling traditions that travelled across generations long before they entered print.
“If we think about the history of stories, poetry and short stories are older. The novel is like yesterday.” Fragments and forms outside the standard arc of novel writing are treated as departures rather than literary lineage. “But because of publishing as a marketplace, a novel has to be about a character and they have to go on this particular journey,” she said.
Kassab is candid about the wider conditions Arab Australian and Australian writers publish into: a landscape she sees as increasingly hollowed out by an American-dominated English-language market.
She cited a telling shift within one major publisher’s Australian operation, where two decades ago its output comprised about 40 to 50 percent local authors, but today that figure has fallen closer to 10 percent.
A healthier literary culture, she argued, would expose readers to voices from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Arab world rather than allowing a single market to dictate taste.
“I sometimes think that if people read a little bit more from other places, maybe I’d be read a little bit differently,” she said.
Kassab’s relationship to the craft itself remains steadfast and what endures is the discipline of the writer.
“I try and write every day. It’s very hard to predict how long an idea will stick around. Maybe for a day, or maybe it’ll stick around like ‘Goodbye, My Love’ … these characters are around for a few months, and then they literally step out of the building and they never come back.”
