Benedicte Grima’s debut novel, Talk Till the Minutes Run Out: An Immigrant’s Tale at 7-Eleven, has been in the making since 2011. But the book’s true origins go back even further. Though a work of fiction, the novel has its roots in Grima’s background as an anthropologist and ethnographer. “This book took a long time to write,” she says.

The novel has two settings: an American city and its community of exiles, refugees, and immigrants and the Swat Valley, a region of Pakistan ravaged first by the Taliban and then by Pakistani government forces.

“There are two parts to [the novel]…fed by different areas of fieldwork,” Grima says. The author, who lives just outside of Philadelphia and works as an editor and language tutor, spent 10 years in the Swat Valley and 10 years in the Pashtun community of Philadelphia. “The chapters about the exile community here were taken from about a year of [my own work] with exile communities,” she says.

The novel centers on Nur Ali, a Pakistani man who has lived in the United States for 15 years. Nur works at a 7-Eleven, the employer of many immigrants like him. Though Grima’s writing occasionally zooms out to provide greater context and background, most of the novel stays close to Nur in its third-person perspective.

Grima wanted the writing to reflect Nur’s consciousness. “I tried to use a style in keeping with the main character,” she says, calling that voice “a little barren, a little stark.”

Kirkus Reviews agrees with her assessment, finding thematic value in the style of writing: “Grima’s prose is largely Spartan in style, unadorned by poetic embellishments but powerfully direct—creating a feeling that unalloyed truth is on offer, without excessive sentiment or melodrama.”

In the U.S., Nur Ali finds a community of fellow exiles and immigrants—convenience-store workers, cab drivers, employees of fast-food franchises. They exchange stories of home and help each other procure phone cards to call their families. Nur, who works the graveyard shift, calls his family in the dead hours of night, when customers are few and far between. From the other side of the world, he tries to administer the affairs of his family back in Pakistan, a task that becomes increasingly difficult.

The calls home help him maintain his status as family patriarch. Grima captures Nur’s efforts to manage the family by phone and provides some cultural context on Pashtun families as well:

Nur Ali insisted on being called the qaida, [or] Qaidada, and he took his role seriously. When his grandchildren addressed him on the phone as “Baba” or “Abu”—the typical term of address for a grandfather—he berated their parents, reminding them to teach the children to call him Qaidada. His own children called him this to emphasize his leadership role. Pashtuns rarely, if ever, used official names when addressing each other.

But Nur doesn’t just transact family business on the calls. They’re also his opportunity to hear from his children and reconnect with his beloved wife, Shahgofta:

Nur Ali’s phone card had signaled a minute remaining when Shahgofta got back on the phone. “Talk to me,” he told her. “No, wait, I have a customer.”

“What do you want me to tell you?” asked Shahgofta.

“Anything. Just talk to me so I can hear your voice. Talk till the minutes run out.” She kept him anchored in the present. He knew that the moment they stopped talking, he would be left to his reminiscences.

With powerful forces threatening his family, Nur realizes he has no control over their affairs and certainly can’t secure their safety. In the village, soldiers violently raid houses in an ongoing search for Taliban sympathizers. Meanwhile, Nur’s brother makes a move to oust him as patriarch and take over the family home. Nur’s health becomes an issue as well, and he longs to go back—back home, yes, but also back to a happier and less complicated time.

Grima decided to turn her years of research into a novel for a couple different reasons. For one, she could change the names of her subjects to conceal their identities. But a bigger reason had to do with the true purpose of the story she wanted to tell. “I wanted to make [this book] more widely readable,” she says. “I think nonfiction has a very limited readership. By turning it into fiction, I thought it would find a broader audience.”

At first, Grima struggled with writing fiction. “It was a very painful transition,” she says. “In social science, you state your facts. You tell the story. [But] in fiction you’re constantly told, ‘Show, don’t tell.’ In other words, use more dialogue. Turn description into dialogue. That was a very conscious exercise for me.”

1Though Talk is a novel, Grima sees its subject as highly academic. In fact, if she had to classify it as a certain subgenre, she’d probably call it historical or cultural fiction “because it does cover a very specific time period,” she says.

“Some things are actually made up but, just like in historical fiction, rooted in the facts of reality,” says Grima. “For instance, the chapter where the exiles come together in the shop—they sit together and exchange stories, memories, poetry. That was composed by me, and yet some parts of it are taken from real life.” Grima calls these real elements “snippets of reality.”

As a scholar and a writer, Grima is sensitive to the politics of cultural appropriation and the consequences of misappropriation. In trying to tell the story as sensitively and accurately as possible, she was heartened by one review that referred to her lack of bias. “That spoke to me,” she said. Though she was undaunted by the risk of writing about a culture other than her own, Grima sees why others are more reluctant. “Memoir is one of the most popular literary genres because of that hesitancy,” she says.

If the novel has a mission, Grima says it’s to increase awareness of and respect for diversity. She recalls how 9/11 sparked a rise in fear and hostility toward immigrant communities. Almost 20 years removed from the events of 2001, the American view of migrants doesn’t seem much better. “I don’t see it mitigating at all,” Grima says.

Still, Grima’s hopeful that the benefits and boons of cultural diversity, brought about by migration, will win out. “There’s more to migration than meets the eye,” she says. “And we’ve got to be open to it.”

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.