I have chosen to juxtapose Nada Awar Jarrar's third novel, A Good Land, with Rawi Hage's second, Cockroach, because of their treatments of the respective themes of repatriation/homecoming and expatriation/exile, and the corresponding portrayals of lives spent, in the present, entirely in or outside of Lebanon. The epigram preceding A Good Land is a telling quotation from Austrian psychiatrist, existential analyst and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl:

The unnamed protagonist in Cockroach, convinced he never had a purpose in life to begin with and feeling neglected by the universe to the point of attempting suicide, finally finds the appropriate moment to infuse exilic existence with a meaning relative to him, one that brings him as close as possible to ‘being at home’. By contrast, Layla, in A Good Land, returns to Lebanon for the purpose of physically being at home and resuming a life interrupted by war and long years spent abroad in anticipation of this moment.