The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Alameddine, Rabih. The Wrong End of the Telescope. Grove Press, 2021.

The Wrong End of the Telescope is broken into 87 titled chapters of varying length and narrated in the first person by Mina, a middle-aged doctor who at the beginning of the novel is traveling to the Greek island of Lesbos towards the end of 2015. She has flown from Chicago, where she lives with her wife, Francine, and is in Lesbos to offer her assistance in the ongoing refugee crisis. The trip takes her as close as she has been for decades to her home city of Beirut. Her brother Mazen, who still lives in Beirut, plans to visit her while she is in Lesbos. At the airport, Mina meets a Palestinian man named Rasheed who is there with a group of aid workers from Jerusalem. He urges Mina to call him, saying that his group could use her help.

Mina first goes to the village of Skala Sikamineas, where she meets her friend Emma, a woman she first met at a transgender health conference and who is in Lesbos with an NGO. In some chapters, Mina addresses an unnamed Lebanese writer character who is implied to be based on Alameddine himself. Mina says that he told her to write a story about refugees after he tried to do so himself and failed. Later, she says that others have reported seeing the writer in the area, and that he seems to have come to help refugees himself but ended up hiding in his hotel room.

Mina witnesses a refugee boat landing and becomes preoccupied with helping a Syrian woman named Sumaiya. Mina is nearly certain Sumaiya is dying of liver cancer, but Sumaiya refuses to be examined, as she fears a diagnosis could affect her family’s ability to stay out of Syria. Sumaiya and her family — consisting of her husband Sammy, her 10-year-old daughter Asma, who wants to be a doctor, and two younger daughters — are settled in the Moria refugee camp. Mina briefly sees the writer at Moria, where he seems to be upset by talking to a young man who left home to pursue an education, as the writer did himself. The writer disappears before Mina can speak to him.

In chapters interspersed with the main timeline, Mina talks about her childhood, including her complicated love for her father and her mother’s coldness towards her, as well as the writer’s experiences immigrating to the United States in his youth, where he struggled to assimilate and to come to terms with his sexuality as a gay man. Mina also recollects stories of refugees that the writer previously wrote about in essays, and tells of how she came to terms with her identity as a transgender woman through her relationship with her first partner, Jennifer. They eventually broke up because Mina wanted to transition to living as a woman, but Jennifer did not want to admit she was a lesbian.

Mina moves to a hotel closer to Moria. The writer nearly runs into her with his car as he is leaving the same hotel. Mina meets with Rasheed and his group, and she meets Mazen at the airport in Mytilene. Mazen, Mina, and Rasheed are present as two journalists at the camp, one Belgian and one English, interview Sammy about his family’s experiences. The translator appears to have trouble with the Syrian dialect, and ignores Sumaiya’s additions to Sammy’s story of how the family fled Syria as members of Daesh were threatening Asma with the prospect of forced marriage. When the journalists say that Sammy is a hero for saving his daughter, making the prejudiced implication that another Muslim father would not have done the same, Mazen becomes enraged, and Emma suggests that the journalists leave.

Sumaiya is given the expected diagnosis and Mina attempts to comfort Asma, but feels awkward. Mina works with Rasheed to treat refugee women, with the aim of finding cases of sexual and physical abuse. Sumaiya asks Mina to take care of her girls. In the meantime, news reaches the camp of sexual assaults committed in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, with reports suggesting that the perpetrators were men of Arab and North African descent and that the assaults were organized. Mazen, Mina, and Rasheed go to a Greek restaurant, where they meet the writer. He tells them that when he arrived, he felt overwhelmed, but is all right now. After dinner, the four of them meet with a crowd of teenage boys attempting to take a ferry to Athens. The writer buys some tickets and the others follow suit, providing two dozen of the boys with passage. Mina later remarks that she has since heard that many Afghan boys are forced into sex work in Athens, and that she hopes the boys they met are long gone.

Sumaiya asks Mina to help her die, explaining that she wants to have some control over the circumstances of her death. Emma argues against this to Mina, feeling that Sumaiya is not in the right state of mind to be able to make such a decision, but later apologizes and offers to help. Mina and Emma prepare to kill Sumaiya with fentanyl patches and plan on doing so without her family’s knowledge. Sumaiya decides at the last minute that she wants to die with Sammy present, so Mina and Emma bring him into the tent. Later, when Mina is video chatting with Francine, Francine remarks that Mina looks happy in a way that she has not seen her in years, and insists that she come home.

Mina recalls how months after the trip to Lesbos the writer came to stay with her and Francine in Chicago while he was teaching at Northwestern. He struggled to write his novel, and attempted to convince Mina to write about refugees instead. However, she finally told him that she was not a writer, so he resolved to do it himself after all.