A review by Kerenn Elkaim, for Livres Hebdo, December 16th, 2022                   
“Memory is a plague. Nevertheless , it can serve as a torch when everything is in tatters”… Ali oscillates between two states. Is he dead or alive? Even he doesn’t know. He wakes up with his body in pain, at the foot of an oak tree. Unable to move, he takes time to understand that he is not there by chance. An explosion seems to have pulverized his regiment. “He has lost his …

Published by Zeit Online, on February 15th, 2023, translated from the Arabic into German by Larissa Bender
Below some excerpts in English, translated with the help of Google translate.
Photo credit (c) Hassan Ammar / AP / Aleppo
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“I never thought that one day I would stand on the hilltop of the world and see Syria being hit by an earthquake. The earth had trembled a few times when I was growing up, and all I remember is my mother’s fear that we would all die under the rubble. She woke us up after midnight and got us out quickly. The …

A review by Richard Jacquemond, for Le Monde des Livres, January 26th, 2023
 
Through the eyes of this half-simple, half-mystical young man, like a character by the Lebanese poet Khalifa Gibran (1883 – 1931), a whole world is seen collapsing under the he effect of a war … But, with Samar Yazbek’s skill, this collapse is told in a minor key, as if the essential were elsewhere, in the life to which those who remain cling

Literary Hub made a list of their favorite crime titles of the early fall, and Douaihy’s exceptional “King of India” is in there! Here is what they say.