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[25 Feb 2021 | No Comment | 196 views]
Al Araby reviews Hoda Barakat’s Night post “Hoda Barakat does it again”!

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.

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[17 Feb 2021 | No Comment | 97 views]
The Guardian reviews Barakat’s Voices of the lost (aka Night post): “Searing”

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, …

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[30 Jun 2020 | No Comment | 73 views]
The book satchel’s selection of the 10 best books of 2020 so far: Dima Wannous’ “The frightened ones”: “Mind-blowing”!

Do you love books that surprise you? I do. I had such a rush reading The Frightened Ones translated from the Arabic. The same kind when I read Bunny by Mona Awad—dark, trippy novel about MFA students and decapitated rabbit heads—and Supper Club by Lara Williams—women indulging in food, gluttony and sex.

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[30 Jun 2020 | No Comment | 41 views]
Irish times, reviewing Dima Wannous’ “The frightened ones” – “Fascinating portrayal of damaged people”

As it presented several books worthy of attention, the Irish times (June 26, 2020) specified, regarding Dima Wannous’ “The Frightened ones”:
“Mention of a novel set in Syria might suggests a story mired in violence and suffering, but in ‘The Frightened Ones’ by Dima Wannous, translated by Elisabeth Jacquette (Harvilll Secker, 242pp, £12.99) the emphasis is on the anguish of Suleima,

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[16 Apr 2020 | No Comment | 72 views]
“Love and loneliness in Syria” “powerfully and subtly” written, “memorable” – The Guardian reviews Dima Wannous’ The frightened ones, just published by Harvill Secker

By Maya Jaggi, published by The Guardian, on April 15, 2020
Midway through Dima Wannous’s novel, the narrator recalls a neighbour who fell sick during a dire shortage of doctors and medicine. The woman’s daughter had to take time off work to hunt for a hospital bed. “So, silently, I begged my own mother not to fall ill,” she says, to “not contract a virus or other disease.”
As well as having a chilling resonance today, the anecdote offers a glimpse of daily life for millions of Syrians since the 2011 revolution. …

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[13 May 2019 | No Comment | 42 views]
Khalifa’s “Death is hard work” is “intensely readable” “wryly compelling” – Financial Times

A review by Financial Times, May 10th 2019
Despite its relentlessly bleak subject matter, Death Is Hard Work is intensely readable. As the pages turn, one is impelled to keep up with the al-Salim siblings as they race against time…