Interview by Hala Kodmani for Liberation, September 2019
In her book, the novelist and activist brings together the testimonies of those she knew and accompanied in her country at war. Nurses, teachers, mothers, often spent in prison, they survived the terror and the war without ever giving up. “Heroines” in search of a secular and democratic revolution.
Samar Yazbek: “Through the voice of these Syrian women, I want to say that we are not victims but resistants”

By Lilia Tak-Tak, in La madeleine des livres, Septemner 2019
“The frightened” is a very beautiful, very strong novel, which depicts with a lot of intensity the fear, anguish, and suffering of a young woman, a young man and by extension those of a people. Feelings that feed each other and create a system of communicating vessels. A real mirror game.
Through the voice of Sulayma, the main character, Dima Wannous leads us into a novel with a complex construction, similar to the meanders of the inner thoughts of Sulayma, thereby bringing a …

A review by Christine Zimmer, for DNA, France, 2019
How is a rumor born, what feeds it? Why? To what end? What becomes of the rumor’s victims? Can we find the source of a rumor? How to react when the rumor strikes you fully and hits you in the most intimate parts of your life? Habib Selmi tackles these questions
with great simplicity and a subtle dose of humor that he slips into seemingly innocuous words. His starting point is an ordinary life without frills, in a remote countryside, where people live near each other, and where …

Interview By Christophe Ayad, for Le Monde, July 25th, 2019
Some extracts translated into English published below.

Hoda Barakat is a rare kind of writer. Born in Lebanon in 1952, she published her first novel relatively late, in 1990, shortly after leaving her country because of the civil war.In six novels, she has won almost all of the most prestigious awards in Arabic literature:

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.