In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. From these encounters comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as one of the most savage military offe...

An unflinching story about Arab masculinity and homoeroticismFurat, a Syrian in his early 20s, visits Sibki Park in Damascus, one of the city’s most popular cruising areas. There he learns about the hammams, secret meeting places for gay men located throughout the old city. Inside these public baths, the air is thick with the scent of bay laurel soap, and naked men hide in the steam. Furat faces sometimes violent disapproval from all levels of society—regime, religion, the man in t...

WINNER OF THE NAQUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTIONONE OF THE 50 MOST IMPORTANT ARABIC NOVELS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (THE NATIONAL)In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one family descends into ruin in this novel from "one of the rising stars of Arab fiction" (New York Times)Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ru...

An acclaimed Syrian journalist crafts a vital portrait of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath through the harrowing yet life-affirming accounts of 26 Palestinians.Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. In Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life—a title adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the resident...

1980s Syria, our young narrator is living a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents in Aleppo. Her three aunts, Maryam the pious one; Safaa, the liberal; and the free-spirited Marwa, bring her up with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant.Soon the high walls of the family home are unable to protect her from the social and political changes outside. Witnessing the crackdowns of the ruling dictatorship against Muslims, she is filled with...

2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST“The potent latest from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station’s 2013 bombing in the Lattakia mountains. This slim novel packs a punch.” —Publishers WeeklyAli, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole—is this his funeral? Th...

Longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Fiction | One of The Washington Post's 50 best works of fiction of 2023"Gorgeous . . . Lush, elegiac [and] Márquezian . . . A novel of abundance and generosity." —Sarah Cypher, The Washington Post"Richly embroidered . . . [Khalifa's] galloping narration restores life and soul to a city that has become a byword for devastation." — The Economist

A sweeping tale of life and death, set in the Syrian capital at the turn of the twentieth century from the International prize winning author of Death is Hard Work and In Praise of Hatred."A soulful and perfectly unsentimental writer." Hisham Matar-December, 1907: one morning after a night of drunken carousing in the city, Hanna and his friend Zakariya return home to their village near Ale...

WINNER OF THE NAQUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTIONONE OF THE 50 MOST IMPORTANT ARABIC NOVELS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (THE NATIONAL)In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one family descends into ruin in this novel from "one of the rising stars of Arab fiction" (New York Times)Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ru...

On a December morning in 1907, two close friends, Hanna and Zakariya, return to their village near Aleppo after a night of drunken carousing in the city, only to discover that there has been a massive flood. Their neighbors, families, children—nearly all of them are dead. Their homes, shops, and places of worship are leveled. Their lives will never be the same.Hanna was once a wealthy libertine, a landowner who built a famed citadel devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and excess. Bu...

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURESamar Yazbek’s work has previously been published in the US. She is mainly known for her non-fiction work. Her non-fiction title A Woman In the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution is a rare early chronicle of the Syrian revolution from inside, and sold around 1,500 copies through BookScan. Her work has been reviewed in the NYT, the Guardian, and the Washington Post, among others....

Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly a...