The following version was used to make this guide: Elhillo, Safia. Home is Not a Country. New York, New York: Penguin Random House, 2021. The novel is written in verse, and includes a prologue and three parts. There are no chapters, but the novel is broken into mini sections of one or more pages, each new section titled. For the purposes of this study guide, the novel is broken into six sections.

The novel begins with the prologue titled “New Country” and the main character looking at a photograph of her parents dancing in the old country. She explains that her father died in a car accident, and she lives with her single mother. Her best friend Haitham lives next door; their mother's best friends from the old country. Yasmeen is the name her mother almost gave her, and she spends time wondering if she was supposed to be that girl. She often thinks about the old country she has never been to, Haitham calling her Nostalgia Monster.

Part 1 “The Other Side” begins with Nima and her mother stopped at the airport from flying, overhearing racist comments. She and Haitham goof off in Arabic class, and play in each other’s apartments. She overhears her mother and her friends complaining about their children and talking about the name Nima almost received - Yasmeen - and wonders what this girl would be like.

On Halloween, a boy at school dressed as a ghost tells Nima he is dressed as her “terrorist dad” and Haitham defends her saying her father is dead (49). Her body starts to become translucent, and one night she sees Yasmeen in her house. She gets in a big fight with Haitham for telling everyone at school about her dad. Increasingly her body goes translucent, and she wonders if Yasmeen has been sent to bring her back to the old world.

One day at school a pack of boys approach her, one of them saying his dad could have been on that plane. They assault her but she defends herself, and the principal suspends all of them. Nima lies to her mother saying it was a fight with another girl, screaming at her about why her mother brought them to America and she wishes her father were there. Nima spends the week at home, suspended. One night they get a call from Haitham’s grandmother that he is at the hospital and they rush to visit him.

Part 2, “Old Country,” begins as they learn how Haitham was beaten unconscious outside their grocery store by some racists. The next day they board the bus to go back to the hospital and Nima’s mother tells her how her father died but Nima runs off the bus and gets lost in a street festival. She then gets lost in a suburb and swims in a stranger’s pool. She sees flickers of Yasmeen and goes to a diner and eats her fill, and a strange man offers to pay for her dinner. He offers her a ride home but instead takes her to a hotel. Yasmeen appears and helps her escape by boarding a shuttle to the airport. At the airport she asks some women who speak Arabic for help, but the women think she is stupid since her Arabic is bad, so Nima runs away again through the airport. She boards an elevator and when it opens she is looking at the photograph of her parents together dancing. She takes Yasmeen’s hand and they are transported into the moment, as if alive. Yasmeen says she is a parallel version of her, and they are visitors there to learn something. Nima sees a big party - with Haitham’s lost father, his mother secretly pregnant, and also sees her own mother (Aisha), newly pregnant.

The next morning, Yasmeen and Nima follow their father to a cafe where he confesses to a friend he is going to leave Nima’s mother. They go back to the house to find Aisha playing a card game with Hala and Amal to decide what to name Aisha’s baby - Yasmeen or Nima. Before the game is over, Nima kicks a tea pot over so they cannot finish. Yasmeen leads Nima to an abandoned building, telling Nima there can only be one of them and tries to push Nima off the roof. They fall together into a river, struggling, but Nima saves Yasmeen from drowning.

Together they walk back to Hala’s house where a party is happening, but Mama Fatheya brings out some incense and the smoke curls around Yasmeen, dissolving her entirely. Yasmeen comes back though and tells Nima she wants to help her, and Nima wants to help her find a life to inhabit too. She takes Yasmeen back to the cafe to the man with her father who desperately wanted a baby. Yasmeen settled, Nima walks to her mother’s house to warn her mother about her father. However, soldiers approach her parents in their car, demanding Aisha. Nima throws rocks at them and they scatter, and her father survives. But he still leaves her mother, and Nima realizes it was always supposed to be the two of them all along. Hala asks Aisha to go to the United States with her, and Nima whispers to her mother, telling her they need each other. Her mother starts repeating her name, creating a portal for Nima.

Part 3, “Home is Not a Country,” begins as Nima falls through the portal, and she lands in the bathtub back home. She and her mother hug and Nima tells her she is enough. Nima realizes that in looking for her father, she was missing what she had with her mother. Haitham recovers in the hospital, and soon they are back in Arabic class together, and a new girl introduces herself as Yasmeen. The novel ends as Nima’s mother gives her her yellow dress, and claps calling Nima, “my precious girl [line break] my graceful one” (211).