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.

Il Manifesto, May, 2020
In an interview to Il Manifesto, Hoda Barakat, first woman to win the prestigious International Prize for Arabic fiction 2019 (or Arab Booker) shares:

By Christophe Ayad, For Le Monde, July 2019
(Photo credit: Lea Crespi, Pasco)
Great talks with great writers 2 | 5. The Lebanese writer, translated all over the world, received the coveted “Arab Booker” in April. This meeting takes place in Paris, her adopted city, where she talks about literature, religion, and the civil war that ignites the Arab world.
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