Jessica Jiji

Diamonds Take Forever

Publication Party • Reading • Signing

Diamonds Take Forever, the debut novel from Iraqi-American author Jessica Jiji, a news editor for the United Nations, provides red-hot perspective on Arab-American affairs

Michelle Benamou has lost everything she ever lusted after, including her hard-bodied ex-Marine boyfriend and her share of their cozy, cheap apartment in Queens. Although her Moroccan relatives worry she’s over the hill because she’s nearly 30 and still single, Michelle learns that the only ordeal worse than dating hell is trying to find an affordable place to live in Manhattan. When massive changes start sweeping across her workplace, the Canadian Broadcasting Company, she has the opportunity to move from news producer to on-air reporter…if she can only stop making inappropriate comments to a top company executive. As if she doesn’t have enough problems, a past flame flares back into her life – but time, distance and his soon-to-be-ex-wife threaten to snuff these rekindling relations before the fire catches and romance gets hot.

Lyssa Keusch, senior editor for Morrow/Avon, notes, “Jessica Jiji has a talented and edgy voice rarely seen in women’s fiction. She draws from her own experience in this novel, writing with wit and humor about an unlikely Jewish-Arab-American protagonist trying to find love in New York City and success in the international radio press corps.”

Jessica Jiji, who is half-Iraqi and half-Bronx, has worked at the United Nations for more than a decade, including as an official spokesperson. In addition to writing Diamonds Take Forever, she is the co-author of three feature-length screenplays: Miss Interpreter, a romantic-comedy-political-thriller about a young UN translator who accidentally stumbles on love and adventure; Queen of the CIA, a screwball comedy about the misadventures of a gay fashion designer recruited by the Agency; and I Married a Shaman, a romantic comedy about a young Korean-American woman whose white-bread husband takes up her mother’s traditional Asian religion – to extremes. She currently works as a UN news editor and lives in her native New York City.

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