A review by Damien Aubel, for Transfuges, December 2018
As all great epistolarians, Madame de Sevigne for example, the immense Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat knows that the art of correspondence is a metaphysical act. Here, a series of letters, with no direct link, follow each other as many variations on pain, and the exquisiteness of absence.

Hoda Barakat has imagined a correspondence written in haste, by people constantly on the run, all seeking a refuge that does not exist.
Muriel Steinmetz, for L’Humanité, November 22, 2018
Hoda Barakat (born in 1952, in Beirut), author of five novels published in France at Actes Sud, creates characters who wander the planet, men and women. Homeless, they are the victims of misery, social change and the conflicts that plague the world.

Starred review by Kirkus, November 2018

Insistent, memorable portrait of the small indignities and large horrors of the civil war in Syria. A native of the Aleppo district, Khalifa—well-known in the Arabic-reading world but new to most American readers and a winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature—here writes of a family both joined and torn apart by death. The paterfamilias knows that his passing is imminent: The first sentence reads, “Two hours before he died, Abdel Latif al-Salim looked his son Bolbol straight in the eye with as much of …

The collection “The whisper of stars” will be published by Dar al saqi on Naguib Mahfouz’ birthday, on December 11th.
World translation rights (except English) are free, and managed by RAYA agency on behalf of Dar al saqi, Beirut.
Culture journalist Mohamed Shoair, was in the middle of writing a book on one of Mahfouz’s works.
 
As Shoair was documenting the publishing history of the novel, he searched through thousands of archives, books, magazines, and newspapers.