Middle East literature in translation

Hudá Barakāt

Set against the fractured landscape of Lebanon’s civil war, this novel follows a young man whose life has been torn apart by kidnapping, hostage exchanges, and hospital internment. In a fragmented, sometimes dreamlike act of recollection, he revisits his village childhood and the intensity of a relationship with a woman from a different faith, using memory as both refuge and interrogation. As his testimony unfolds, the book probes how responsibility is assigned in wartime, how truth can blur under trauma, and what it means to remain human amid political violence. With Hudá Barakāt’s incisive, psychologically charged storytelling—translated with fluid precision for English readers—readers are drawn into a meditation on exile, marginalization, and the enduring power of love and belief under pressure.