In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told. 

Following the life story of two inseparable friends, Hannah and Zakaria, from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century in Aleppo, No one prayed over their graves, reveals a buzzing, multiconfessional, libertine, tolerant society, coming to grips with the various forms of death.

A detective story set on the background of family and sectarian feuds, The king of India, explores with the right dose of irony, the meaning of attachment to the land.

A review by Elliot Ackerman for The New York Times Review of Books, published February 26th, 2019
How many times can you read about barrel bombs falling on civilians in Aleppo or Islamic State execution squads or sarin gas attacks before the sheer quantity of incidents denudes each of meaning? The facts, devoid of a narrative, lose their weight. That’s the power of mass violence: its ability to transform specific loss into general loss, numbing our collective consciousness. This is why novelists like Khalifa are so critical in these times. They …