This article was written by Heba Saleh for the Financial Times. Only a few excerpts are featured below. For the full article, please refer to the Financial Times‘ website. Published on October 6th 2015.
Photo credit: The Guardian, Sedat Suna
As the Arab world grapples with unrest across many of its countries, the Arab novel, a form that has undergone something of a revival in recent years, has found inspiration in the region’s political cataclysms. A powerful style of fiction has emerged that probes subjects relating to freedom, violence, identity, religion and the failure …

A review by by Rehana Rossouw, for Business Day, published September 25, 2015
Photo credit: Muhsin Akgun
IN SYRIA millions of people’s lives, homes and livelihoods have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of abject refugees are streaming out to neighbouring countries and Europe. Since the start of the war in 2011 more than 250,000 Syrians have died — inside the country and on their way out — as Aylan Kurdi’s body on a beach will forever testify.
Samar Yazbek travels in the opposite direction, crawling under the barbed wire on the border with Turkey, …

This article was commissioned to the author by Handelsblatt, September 25, 2015
Things must seem a little familiar for the Europeans, at least for the older generations. The images are the same, even if this time they are in color and are shown in their living rooms, instead of being black-and-white pictures viewed at the local movie theater. They are the images from the years after both World Wars, images of flight and displacement. Horrible images.

Lydia Wilson, for The Times Literary Supplement, published on the 23rd of September 2015.
An excerpt is featured below.
 
Well into its fifth year, the conflict in Syria only seems to worsen every day, the news impossible to foresee from one month to the next, with warnings from the UN, NGOs and charities growing ever more desperate. And all the while the feelings of helplessness grow. What can we do? Or, increasingly, what should we have done? Would early intervention have been the better option, stopping, or at least slowing, the carnage, …

Interview conducted by Margrethe Zacho Haarde for Aftenposten, published on September 25.
Photo credit: Aftenposten
(….) Samar Yazbek has written her fifth book, a literary narrative, The Crossing. Yazbek writes about Syrian families who have been displaced from their homes and hiding in cold, dark caves; children with amputated limbs who sit in the sun and play.

A reviewe by Agnes Rotivel, for La Croix, published October 5th, 2015
(…) Here we are again in this mainly Sunni port city in Northern Lebanon – too often overshadowed by the capital Beirut – for which the author confesses a passion. Yet he is born in Zgherta, a Christian Maronite stronghold, 8 km away. “A tough city that made war to Tripoli in 1975,” he recalls, referring to the start of the Lebanese civil war.