By M Lynx Qualey, for Middle East Eye, 15 April 2021
 
Much as Kafka’s young Gregor Samsa woke one morning to find he was an insect, Aziz Mohammed’s young narrator wakes to find his nose is bleeding, a first sign of his leukaemia. The Critical Case of a Man Called K, the Saudi author’s first novel, is in some ways a re-telling of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, through the lens of the changes happening to a critically ill body.

By Bobsphere, February 16, 2021
Hoda Barakat’s novel, Voices of the Lost manages to pull off quite a feat. This is a novel about war, it is a political novel. It is also a novel about love, ranging from filial to romantic, abuse, trauma, , fatherhood, motherhood it’s all in there. Like a piece of tapestry this novel weaves in themes, which create multi-layered result.

By Tahmina Begum, for Al Araby, February 19, 2021
Usually, when you open up a book, which begins with a letter, you presume that the answer is hidden somewhere in the pages. Instead what you get with Voices of The Lost, is a sense of ambiguity and a human chain revealing that we’re all much more similar than we recognise. That we see our stories inside one another, even those whose circumstances on the surface seem opposing to ours.

By Madeleine Thien, for The Guardian, February13th, 2021
 
A chain of letters links five refugees in the Lebanese writer’s searing prizewinner
“That country is now gone,” observes an unnamed woman in Voices of the Lost. “It is finished, toppled over and shattered like a huge glass vase. To attempt to bring any of this back … could produce only a pure, unadulterated grief, an unbearable bitterness.” The woman is waiting in a hotel in an unnamed European country for a lover she has not seen in decades. As the hours tick by, …

Interview and forward by Nada Ghosn, for The Markaz Review, November 9, 2020
In the cities or in the countryside, in the first year, women were symbols, the showcase of the revolution. But they were symbolically murdered by their comrades. They were the targets of the regime, of the revolutionaries, as well as of the militias that oppressed them politically. With the war, the tensions within Syrian identity since the country’s independence exploded. Our identity became fragmented. Intellectuals proved to be communitarian and separatist as well. Revolutionaries have not been less …

Do you love books that surprise you? I do. I had such a rush reading The Frightened Ones translated from the Arabic. The same kind when I read Bunny by Mona Awad—dark, trippy novel about MFA students and decapitated rabbit heads—and Supper Club by Lara Williams—women indulging in food, gluttony and sex.