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Sign up todayWhen a Camel Breaks Your Heart
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreIn this haunting and fabulist tale, a young woman’s would-be fiancé, Mahir, transforms—quite literally—into a camel.
Mahir—once the object of her affection and muse for her art—now embodies the vast differences between their respective backgrounds as a white American woman and a first-generation American Muslim. She attempts to uncover the mystery of his transformation, sorting through their past, trying to understand the present, and coming to terms with the future—all while dealing with the practical needs of the large exotic animal nesting in her living room.
Set against the backdrop of the American invasion of Iraq, the story weaves together the magical and the mundane, with a dose of wry humor and the absurd, building toward a surprising ending.
Kodi Scheer teaches writing at the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA. She was awarded the Dzanc Prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service. As a recent fellow of the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, she traveled to Bulgaria to engage with an international community of writers, translators, and readers. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, The Florida Review, Quarterly West, and Bellevue Literary Review. She also serves as writer-in-residence for the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Reviews
“A beautiful, sad, hilarious, moving story about love, commitment, geopolitics, metamorphosis and a dromedary camel by a talented young writer. —Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish
“In “When A Camel Breaks Your Heart”, Kodi Scheer’s wondrously inventive imagination brings us into a world where love is as unsteady and beautiful as a ride on a camel’s back. Can one person live in another person’s world just by dint of wishing? With sharp and tender language, Scheer interrogates our expectations of reality and each other.” —V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of Love Marriage
“The story is bookended by a strange comedic twist. (“Remember the good times,” the narrator tells herself early on, “when Mahir was still human.”) But the bittersweet center of the story becomes even more affecting in the face of the poetic absurdity that undoes it.” —Liz Colville, San Francisco Chronicle
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