Syria

When I found this book on the shelves of my local bookshop I was relieved. So many Syrian novels published in the UK are written by people who left the country, which is understandable but I have a strong preference for novels written by people who live in the places they are writing about. This has been strengthened as I continue the project, I enjoy the books that really dig in to the authors home, either by birth or choice.

Roundabout of Death by Faysal Khartash, translated by Max Weiss. My edition was published by Head of Zeus in 2022 and originally published in Arabic in 2017.

This novel is set mainly in Aleppo, though it has some interesting detail around bus rides to other cities, possibly my favourite part of the novel other than the beginning.

"The women and girls hurriedly filed to the back of the bus, pulled out their niqabs, and placed them on their heads. I watched two of them in particular, two women I thought were sisters: one was a hairstylist and cosmetologist...

There were seven women on the bus and now they were all sitting in the rear, niqabs covering their faces."

The protagonist is a man with a family, describing the difficulties of his everyday life during the Syrian civil war. His energy is spent but not used up, his focus mostly but not exclusively on minutiae. It has parallels to other novels I've read this year, the description of travel in times of threat equates to both Grey Bees and Minor Detail. There is an undertone of male power, the power of soldiers, that runs through all three books, through every war. That theme of male power seems to come through in most of the novels I read, whether by accident or by design but the responses are fascinatingly broad, cultures so varied in their interaction with that power.