A Woman Is No Man

A Woman Is No Man is a novel by the Palestinian-American writer Etaf Rum, published in 2019 by Harper. It is her first novel.

The book is set among a conservative Arab-American family in Brooklyn and is told across two generations of women. Deya has been raised by her grandparents after her parents died, and she is now of an age to be married, which her grandmother is arranging in the same way she arranged the marriage of Deya's mother. Isra, Deya's mother, came from Palestine to Brooklyn as a young bride and found a household in which she had no authority and very little company, and her sections of the book describe that life from the inside. Rum writes the novel in short chapters that alternate between the two women, so the reader understands before Deya does what the family has been hiding, and the novel is about the costs of a tradition carried across an ocean.

Rum drew on her own experience of growing up in a similar community, and the book was widely discussed for its account of the pressures placed on women within it.