By Isabella Hammad, for The New York Times, June 22, 2019
Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto — although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university colleagues to make that assumption. He means the “ghetto” of the Palestinian town of Lydda, created by Jewish forces who uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians on a death march in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 1948 Nakba. (That …

Published by Arab News, June 18th
Out of Baghdad comes “The Book of Collateral Damage” (Fihris, or Index), by internationally celebrated author Sinan Antoon, whose fourth novel follows the life of introspective academic Nameer Al-Baghdadi, an Iraqi living in the US. An encounter in Baghdad with an eccentric bookseller while travelling with documentary filmmakers as a translator leads Nameer to a manuscript that forces him to explore memories of the past, the loss of his home and the destruction caused by war.

A review by Financial Times, May 10th 2019
Despite its relentlessly bleak subject matter, Death Is Hard Work is intensely readable. As the pages turn, one is impelled to keep up with the al-Salim siblings as they race against time…  

A review by Hisham Matar, for The Guardian, May 11th, 2019
Set three years into the Syrian civil war, the novel’s plot is compellingly simple. Bolbol, the deeply sensitive and conflicted protagonist, has just lost his father. He gathers his two older siblings, Hussein and Fatima, to help him honour their father’s last wish – to be buried in Anabiya, the family’s ancestral village, about 350km north of Damascus. Ordinarily, the journey would take under five hours; if it weren’t for the sad occasion it would be a pleasurable drive, with …

Review by Jerome Avenas, for Toute la Culture, April 29th, 2019
Published by Éditions Gallimard in the collection “Du monde entier”, the novel by Dima Wannous, a Syrian writer born in 1982, is an impressive text on the trauma of war, memory and writing. An urgent read.
A man and a young woman meet in the waiting room of a psychiatrist under the eye of Layla, the medical secretary. Sulayma and Nassim consult for anxiety disorders: anxiety, panic attacks, self-mutilation but especially “fear of fear”, insidious and vertiginous disease which is the “fear of having …

April 2019, La Viduite.
The fear of fear, the vertiginous duplication of fiction, a story that merges with a reality whose unbearable horror is then revealed. By dipping into the psyche of a disturbed woman, by the exact restitution of her obsessions and gestures, Dima Wannous manages to draw a sadly faithful portrait of contemporary Syria. With its carnal precision, “The frightened” appears like an immense novel about human fear and mechanisms of defense.