Indies Introduce Q&A with Nussaibah Younis

Nussaibah Younis is the author of Fundamentally, a Winter/Spring 2025 Indies Introduce adult selection and March 2025 Indie Next List pick.

Austin Carter of Pocket Books Shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, served on the bookseller panel that selected Younis’ book for Indies Introduce.

Carter said of the title, “Younis’ debut novel slices through the hypocrisies, corruption, and ineffectiveness of both academia and governmental organizations with wickedly dark humor and razor-sharp dialogue. Readers will hate to love and love to hate Dr. Nadia Amin as she works through her own savior narrative, first as farce and then as tragedy.”

Austin Carter: Hi, I am Austin Carter. I'm a co-owner at Pocket Books Shop, a queer feminist bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And I am so excited to be here chatting with Dr. Nussaibah Younis, who is the author of the wonderful book, Fundamentally, which definitely deserves a place on your shelves. If you are also a bookstore owner, or if you're just a reader, then you need to be reading it, because this is one of my favorite books that I've read in the last several months. So I'll just read a little bio of Dr. Younis, and we'll go from there.

Nussaibah is a peacebuilding practitioner and a globally recognized expert on contemporary Iraq. She has a PhD in international affairs from Durham University in the UK, and a BA in modern history and English from the University of Oxford. Dr. Younis was a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, where she directed the Future of Iraq Task Force and offered strategic advice to US government agencies on Iraq policy. Dr. Younis has published op eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian, and has provided on air commentary for the BBC and Al Jazeera.

I am very out of my depth here, but that's okay. She's also the author of the fabulous debut novel, Fundamentally. Before we jump into questions, do you want to give your elevator pitch for what Fundamentally is all about?

Nussaibah Younis: Yeah, absolutely. First, I want to thank you, Austin. You've been so supportive of the book. I really appreciate it. You've been such a massive champion. Thank you for reading it and for getting so on board. I was actually really worried about whether or not the book would connect in the US. So, this has been just such an amazing start.

Fundamentally, is a dark comedy. It's about a heartbroken academic called Nadia who decides to cope with her breakup by accepting a job with the UN in Baghdad. It's actually a great way to get over a breakup. I can definitely recommend it. When she gets to Iraq, she's tasked with creating a program to de-radicalize ISIS brides, and that is not something Nadia knows how to do. There commences a nightmare of bureaucracy and corruption and colleagues who despise her. Just as she's about to give up and go back to London with her tail between her legs, she visits the refugee camp and meets Sara, a young ISIS bride who joined when she was just 15. Sara is bold and funny and witty and precocious, and she has a strong east London accent. Nadia and Sara really connect. It's electricity. They have such good banter. Sara just really reminds Nadia of a younger version of herself, and that connection really fuels Nadia to actually try and make that job work. She wants to save Sara, though it's not clear whether Sara wants to be saved.

AC: Absolutely! So, what Nussaibah is underplaying here is just how incredibly funny this book is. As you read it, you're going to be in hysterics. I particularly love this book — I'm also a former academic, not a heartbroken academic, necessarily. But all of the bits where Nadia's just waiting for some colleagues to die so that she can get a job, I was like, “I really understand this.” I was doing that and they didn't die fast enough, so I opened a bookstore instead.

NY: The struggle is real.

AC: Very much. You don't want to relate to Nadia quite as much as I did, which you probably can agree with.

NY: That's the trick, because she is you.

AC: That is the real problem. The books that I love the most — and probably you love the most — are the ones that get the reviews that say “I didn't really like the main character.” Well, that was your mistake, because you are her. She is all of us.

NY: I love a flawed heroine.

AC: Flawed is an understatement and correct. I just loved her.

Let's dive into some questions. In Fundamentally, you offer a brilliant satire of people who take very seriously the business of solving the world's problems. Be they academics with unified theories of feminist resistance to colonial oppression, or humanitarian bureaucrats hell-bent on securing funding to draft committees to plan programs that will definitely, probably help people, maybe, eventually.

In real life, you have occupied both of those worlds. I did some light stalking on your website. You call yourself a “former do-gooder with experience in academia, think tanks, and peacebuilding in the Middle East.” Can you talk a little bit about what drove you to take aim, so to speak, and write this particular book?

NY: The book is really inspired by both my professional and my personal life. I'm such a bleeding-heart empath, and I grew up watching the wars in Chechnya and Afghanistan and Iraq on TV, and was just absolutely desperate to do something to help people.

I ended up forging a career in peacebuilding. I ended up working in Iraq, and I was asked to help design a program to de-radicalize ISIS brides in Iraq. When I went to a refugee camp and met my first ever ISIS brides, I had this shocking realization how easily I could have ended up on the other side.

I grew up very religious, and I attended a summer camp when I was 17 with a preacher, an American Yemeni preacher called Sheik Anwar al-Awlaki. I really liked him. He was so funny and he was charming, and he was really compelling when he talked about our duty to help defend people. It really tugged at my heart strings.

A couple of years later, he joined al Qaeda, and that was just an astonishing turn of events that hadn't occurred to me. I realized that, had he done it that summer — had he tried to radicalize me. I wonder what would have happened. It would have been born out of that same impulse of wanting to go to the Middle East to help people who are suffering. But if someone had persuaded me that that was the correct route when I was young and impressionable and didn't know any better, I just wonder what would have happened.

So I wanted to write a novel in which I could explore that sliding doors moment and look at those two different versions of myself: me, as I did turn out working with international NGOs in peacebuilding backed by the US government and other Western governments. What would happen if that version of me confronted a younger version of me who'd taken another path, who thought she'd done the right thing by joining ISIS, also to defend people and to help people who were suffering in that part of the world? And what would happen if those two versions of myself confronted one another, both thinking that they'd done the right thing? I thought that would just be such a fabulous kind of premise for a novel, and so fascinating, but also with endless opportunity for humor, because can you imagine having a conversation with your 15-year-old self? It would be so annoying!

AC: Exactly! And you have so much compassion for Sara, just remembering how much you make your decisions based on terrible things, like who you think is funny or charming, or what your friends are doing. She mentioned, “Well, my friends did this, and it seemed not that bad.”

NY: Yeah, oh my god. There's this moral certitude that teenagers often have. She so believes that she's done the right thing, and it's actually really difficult to argue with her, because she has this very black and white perspective on the world.

What do you tell someone, when you're challenged, “How are you helping?” It's so difficult to answer that question. I thought it was so relatable as well to think about your 15-year-old self, looking at your life as it's turned out, and being disappointed and thinking, “Well. You could have done better. You should have done more.”

AC: Exactly, because that's the space that Nadia is in already. She's already sitting there like, “Wait, should I have done better? Should I have done something else? Am I doing the best that I can?” And to meet up with the externalized version of that is stressful to say the least. That's so much of what the novel is about. I think you do such an interesting job of exploring, on so many different levels, the kind of chasm between what we think we understand the world to be, or ourselves to be, versus what we actually experience or see in the real world.

Nadia has a PhD in criminology, she's got a relatively hastily researched and written article proposing a program to de-radicalize ISIS brides, and then all of a sudden, she has UN funding to do exactly that. But when she arrives in Iraq, she realizes just how little all of her academic and critical understanding of this situation has prepared her to actually be there and do the things she says she's qualified to do. The opening bit of chapter one is Nadia arriving in Baghdad, and she's just shocked to see fairy lights and Audis and teens practicing TikTok dances.

So, I'll just quote a minute. “‘Why was it so nice?’ she wonders, ‘What happened to the rolling blackouts, the electrical transmission network supposedly ravaged by war? Hadn't I donated to help the Iraqi women giving birth in cow sheds lit by the flame of a single candle?’”

How do you flip Nadia's expectations on their heads throughout the novel? You do this in so many ways with so many different characters, and what does that gap between what she thinks she knows and what she actually experiences allow you to do as an author in the novel?

NY: I thought it was so fun to satirize foreigners who show up in a war zone or in a developing country who think that they are going to be saviors. It's such a hubristic attitude, and definitely one that I have had and have been humiliated for having had. The idea that you show up in a place and think you know better — that you have something to offer that locals don't have tenfold more. I love the idea of having Nadia show up and be totally shocked that Baghdad is actually quite nice, that locals are driving much better cars than her, when she can't even afford a car.

There's a scene in the novel where Nadia meets the Minister of Humane Affairs for the first time, and Nadia is wearing some hideously cheap suit because she thinks, well, she's humanitarian, why would clothes matter? And of course, the minister immediately has no respect for her, because the minister's wearing designer clothes from head to toe, and is demanding trips to luxury hotels on the Mediterranean in order to give Nadia direct sign-off for her program. She’s suddenly thrust into this world where she's dealing with the global elite, because she's with the UN and is dealing with government ministers. This isn't actually a poor country, that's just her prejudice and her ignorance. Everything's been turned on its head once she actually arrives, and she's very much put in her place. I thought it was quite a fun way to satirize, kind of the broader approach and some of the expectations that exist in the humanitarian world.

AC: Absolutely. Then there's that kind of double twist for your — how should I say — well-intentioned white readers, perhaps, who will look at Nadia and be like, “Wait, but aren't you — ? How are you confused? Because aren't you the same — ? Wait, what?” There’s that extra subtle twist of the knife that you're doing, it doesn't get commented on, but it's there, and I'm very excited to see how people respond.

NY: Yeah, I've talked a lot with my publishers about the notion of a brown savior. Nadia thinks that she can't be prejudiced because she's not white, but actually, she definitely can be.

AC: She's like, “I'm not doing anything problematic. I can't.”

Early in the novel, Nadia is enraptured by this young girl at the camp named Sara. I loved every moment that Sara is on the page. Nadia very quickly makes Sara her entire focus — maybe in a good way, maybe not — despite the girl’s seeming disinterest in being saved. Nadia is completely in over her head and unaware, or at least, very good at ignoring the ironies of her attempts to help others in order to help herself. Fundamentally, in general, is a novel interested in the conflicting forces of self-interest and the desire to help others.

Now I'm just asking big philosophical questions here, but is selfishness mutually exclusive with selflessness? What is Fundamentally trying to say about what it means to really want to help? We're talking about white saviors and brown saviors, and this desire to be a do-gooder, what is the novel trying to get at?

NY: Fundamentally really wants to explore what's beneath that surface level expression, “I just want to help people.” It explores that, not just through Nadia — who's really there to escape her feelings about her heartbreak and her difficult relationship with her mother — but through a whole cast of really fun characters. You have Pierre, who's a French Nepo Baby. His father and his grandfather were French ambassadors to the US, and Pierre’s only working at the UN is a great disappointment to the family by comparison. Pierre is there because it's the family business to be in international diplomacy, and is hugely defensive, because in his family context he's considered to be someone who hasn't succeeded. He's constantly trying to prove himself, but is also very grumpy about not having had control over his career.

Pierre has this bromance with his best friend, Charles, who is from a very high-powered political family in South Africa. His dad used to be an advisor to Nelson Mandela. Charles is this wunderkind, PhD at 19, married at 22, got three kids, who realized in his late 20s that he'd just never been young. For Charles, moving to Iraq to join the UN is a holiday.

You'd be surprised how many people you meet in international aid, who are just running away from their families. If you've ended up with a wife and kids and you regret that, moving to a war zone or a developing country, and living on a compound with lots of people you can sleep around with, and you can drink heavily — it's a very intense environment, but it can be very fun — definitely gets you away from your home life.

Even Sherri — who's this real classic, bleeding heart, white liberal, feminist environmentalist who cares a lot about climate change — is actually just trying to pay reparations, as it were, for her father, who is an oil man. It's just this huge, oversized reaction to the family she grew up in. That's one of the things I really enjoyed with writing the book, there's so much opportunity with all the fun characters on the UN base to explore how they'd ended up in this world and what sort of individual motivations they really had, apart from trying to help.

AC: The opportunity for humor in each of those characters is endless. It's a gold mine. We didn't even mention Tom, who is this himbo. We meet him right away. He unironically quotes Lawrence of Arabia all the time.

NY: I know someone who does that!

AC: I assumed! I was like, “This detail is too on the nose. She must have met this guy in real life. There's no way she came up with this.” It would be obscene if it didn't actually happen.

The satire is outrageous. It's so funny. Are you nervous at all that people are not going to get it? And by that, I mean, are you ready for the people to want to complain in reviews about “Well, but these are actually serious issues, so I don't know that we need to be making fun of people who want to help.”

NY: I've been really lucky to have lots of early readers, and the feedback has just been overwhelming in how much people have enjoyed the humor. When I started working on this topic, a lot of people told me, because I have a PhD, that the obvious choice was to write a nonfiction book about the question of ISIS brides. And I thought, “my god, what a chore that book would be to read.” Even if you bought it, it would be because you felt like you had to. You would put it on the shelf and think, “Oh, maybe one day.”

This world that I'm describing is not a boring world to exist in or to experience. It's funny, it's wild, it's fascinating, and it's completely emotional. It gets at every single facet of the human experience. And so I wanted to write a novel that was a joy to read and that it was difficult to put down, rather than having something that felt like a task that you had to complete, like homework.

AC: Yeah, books shouldn't be eating your greens. This shouldn't be a thing you're forcing yourself to do because you think it makes you a better person. Books are there because you can learn through them in the most enjoyable way. And that's okay. As you're talking, I'm thinking about how this very serious academic-focused world ends up being the mirror opposite. Like, if there were a true novel about Hollywood or being a celebrity, that would just be sitting around waiting and getting your makeup done and doing paperwork — not nearly as glamorous as you think. Whereas this UN novel, it's just them going to clubs and sleeping around.

NY: I know. Because the industry has to project this sense of being very serious, all of the fun stuff goes below the radar. I’ve also read so little that really showed what it's like to work in international NGOs and in the UN. It's such a hidden world, and it's so fascinating, and such a great lens into big political issues, but not in a laborious way.

AC: It truly had never occurred to me. All the people for the UN are living in these college campuses, basically, these little compounds. Of course that's what they're doing. That had just never occurred to me. Of course, they're wilding out while they’re there.

I do have one more question, but there's just so much more to discuss in the novel. I wish we had time to talk about Nadia and her mom, which is such a beautiful, compelling, complex relationship that's the undercurrent of the novel. I just cry thinking about it. I loved it. But I don't have time for that, so I'm skipping over it.

We're going to go back to the very beginning and talk about the novel's title, Fundamentally. The title is referring, most obviously, to Islamic fundamentalism. Nadia refers to Sara and the other ISIS brides as fundies — they refer to each other as fundies — with religious extremism figured as a kind of dangerous ideology. But if you look closely at the novel, you'll see that all ideology is kind of suspect.

You have these characters who all believe in things very strongly, or at least they want to profess that they believe in things very strongly. Sherri is devoted to — if not the practice, the language of — social justice and environmentalism and feminism. Rosie, who's Nadia's ex-girlfriend, has these deceptively restrictive rules of how you can be queer, and that there's maybe actually only one good way of doing it. Nadia’s mom has these confusingly conservative, but not always, mores. And all those are very sympathetic to people's seemingly fundamental desire for rules and guidance.

I'm thinking about how Nadia has just bounced from a strict devotion to Islam when she's very young, to following Rosie's rules of how to be a cool, queer, radical person. Then she's following all of the mind-numbing rules of academia, which are legion and nonsensical. Her grasping for guidance and meaning. What are you hoping that readers take away from your novel when it comes to belief kind of broadly writ?

NY: I think belief in the novel is really a function of your messy home life and upbringing. I think the novel is just very empathetic. It shows a lot of different people who think that they believe different things very strongly, and who commit to different lifestyles very strongly. But you start to see how much messiness there is underneath it, and how much it relates to a desire for belonging, a desire for meaning. Often, when people behave and think in the most extreme ways, it's a reflection of a real loss of connection with a birth family or with a community of origin, and that's why the emotional undercurrent of the book is really about Nadia and Sara's loss of real supportive relationships with their families.

I think the book really tries to say that the ideology itself isn't the thing that matters, it's why people have chosen to attach themselves to one or another, and what really lays behind that. It was important to me that the book, in no way, be didactic. It doesn't tell you what you should believe, and it doesn't tell you what you should think or how you should judge each of these characters. They're all deserving of judgment in some way or another. They're all so human, and the messiness is something that we can all relate to.

AC: I feel like every truly good novel is just about how hard it is to be a person. It's the hardest thing there is, and you've nailed it! You did it!

NY: Thank you so much!

AC: Of course. I am so excited for Fundamentally to hit shelves on February 25. It also has the most stunning cover. It's going to look so good, I'm so excited. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Thank you for writing this book, and I can't wait to see what you're working on next.

NY: Thank you so much, Austin, it was great to properly chat with you.

---

Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis (Tiny Reparations Books, 9780593851388, Hardcover Fiction, $28) On Sale: 2/25/2025

Find out more about the author at nussaibah.com

ABA member stores are invited to use this interview or any others in our series of Q&As with Indies Introduce debut authors in newsletters and social media and in online and in-store promotions. Please let us know if you do.