Finalist for the 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers
“Three Parties is such a powerful, funny, brilliantly plotted novel, as beautiful on the line level as it is emotionally complex. With an expert eye, Ziyad Saadi interrogates our often futile attempts to present ourselves to the world on our own terms. This is a subtle, subversive book, full of characters I won’t soon forget, and marking the debut of a sharp, necessary voice in contemporary literature.”
—Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
“From the very first page, I was hooked by the intimacy and precision of Saadi’s writing. Every gesture, every glance is charged with meaning, a testament to a writer who has mastered the art of looking closely and feeling deeply. Saadi’s ability to illuminate the interiority of his characters is breathtaking; he offers a vivid sense of time and place without ever pulling the lens too far back, trusting readers to meet the specificity of experience on its own terms rather than diluting it for the sake of relatability. It’s more than a queer coming-of-age novel—it’s a visceral, somatic experience that insists you pause, breathe, and feel every heartbeat, every ache, every careful act of becoming. I couldn’t look away.”
—Samra Habib, author of We Have Always Been Here
“A thrilling novel about our interior selves, an immersive character study that charges to a crushing, shocking conclusion. In an age of inattention, Saadi lingers on the complex currents that underlie what we do and how we live. He masterfully plumbs the words behind our words, for the truths they reveal about us despite our best efforts to conceal them, even from ourselves. In precise, beautiful language, Three Parties shows us that our multitudes are less intersections than they are whole meldings, created through our various catastrophes, big and small. This is a work of rare brilliance.”
—Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian
“Exceptional begets exceptional in the case of . . . Ziyad Saadi’s Three Parties . . . that interpolate[s] Woolf’s seminal, century-old work. [Saadi’s] capable modernizing nods to the timelessness of Woolf as well as to the value of 21st-century adaptations. . . . Three Parties, set in 2016, first registers less as based on Mrs. Dalloway than inspired by it. . . . Saadi’s considerable feat is an impressive tragicomic balancing act. . . . The Woolfian undercurrents, though, steadily seep through to the surface of this novel that shares tropes in common with family-holiday-reunion comedies.”
—Quill & Quire
“A politically sophisticated and often wickedly funny first novel, grounded in the foibles of human nature and how we respond to them.”
—The British Columbia Review
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