A review by Fifi Abou Dib, for L’Orient Littéraire, February 2nd, 2023
Neither dream nor nightmare. But an oak leaf is stuck to one of his eyelids, and Ali cannot move. Is he dead ? Is he alive? Is he in limbo, between two states? The Wind’s Abode by Samar Yazbek is the story of an agony experienced from within, observed from above, between pain, reminiscences, hallucinations and illumination.

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.

By Bobsphere, February 16, 2021
Hoda Barakat’s novel, Voices of the Lost manages to pull off quite a feat. This is a novel about war, it is a political novel. It is also a novel about love, ranging from filial to romantic, abuse, trauma, , fatherhood, motherhood it’s all in there. Like a piece of tapestry this novel weaves in themes, which create multi-layered result.

By Tahmina Begum, for Al Araby, February 19, 2021
Usually, when you open up a book, which begins with a letter, you presume that the answer is hidden somewhere in the pages. Instead what you get with Voices of The Lost, is a sense of ambiguity and a human chain revealing that we’re all much more similar than we recognise. That we see our stories inside one another, even those whose circumstances on the surface seem opposing to ours.

By Madeleine Thien, for The Guardian, February13th, 2021
 
A chain of letters links five refugees in the Lebanese writer’s searing prizewinner
“That country is now gone,” observes an unnamed woman in Voices of the Lost. “It is finished, toppled over and shattered like a huge glass vase. To attempt to bring any of this back … could produce only a pure, unadulterated grief, an unbearable bitterness.” The woman is waiting in a hotel in an unnamed European country for a lover she has not seen in decades. As the hours tick by, …

Photograph courtesy of © 2020 Marwan Chamaa
A few minutes after 6:00pm, Beirut time, on August 4th, I received an all too familiar WhatsApp message from a friend “Family in Beirut ok?”. I instantly knew what this meant: Something somewhere in Beirut must have exploded. I immediately go to Twitter, seeking an answer to my question: Gas leak or booby trapped car?
Ok, immediate family is safe WhatsApp confirms in parallel. I was not too worried at first. But the tone on Twitter was alarming.