27/08/2026
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BABA WAS A ROLLING STONE
BY SAMAâAN ASHRAWI
PRE-ORDER NOW
COMING OCTOBER 2026
This October, weâre very excited to be publishing Baba Was a Rolling Stoneâthe brilliant first book from Samaâan Ashrawi. Samaâan is one of the most exciting young writers on culture in America who weâve been keeping an eye on ever since we came across him on Twitter during lockdown.
In a debut of wild scope, Samaâan Ashrawiâs Baba Was a Rolling Stone tells the stories of his fatherâs place within the nascent Palestinian rockânâroll scene of the 60s, as well as the authorâs own odyssey through the living history of American music and culture. Told in the voice of âthe writerâ, who attempts to track down a member of Al-Baraâem,(The Blooms in English), the revolutionary family band his father fronted in his native Palestine, now missing somewhere in America, Ashrawiâs tale takes the form of a series of road trips that act as the catalyst for discoveries and recoveries of diasporic family histories and the great traditions of American music. From the early blues through to New York hip-hop, hardcore punk, indie, classic funk and bleeding into stand-up, visual art, graffiti and fashionââBaba Was a Rolling Stone joins the infinite dots of American culture in a wholly new, wholly original way, and in apparently effortless, elegant prose, brings us a world of migrant America as influential as it is invisible. This is not just a book for our age, but truly a book for the agesââa book that contains all of Whitmanâs American multitudesââand so, of course, that contains the whole worldâs.
âBaba Was a Rolling Stone is an achievement of a book, which traverses multiple landscapesâliteral and emotionalâwith tenderness, thoughtfulness, vivid imagery and sharp storytelling. This book succeeds in answering the question of how we can see ourselves in our beloveds, across geography, across generations, across sound and song.ââHanif Abdurraqib
