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Samar Yazbek is a Syrian writer and journalist. In 2010, Yazbek was selected as one of the Beirut39, organized by the Hay Festival. In 2011, she took part in the popular uprising against the Assad regime and was forced into exile soon after. In 2012 she was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize for her book A Woman in the Crossfire, and received the PEN Sweden Tucholsky Prize and the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award the following year. More about this author >
Leri Price is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature three times, in 2024 and 2021 for her translations of Samar Yazbek’s Where the Wind Calls Home and Planet of Clay, and in 2019 for Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work. More about this author >
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Translated from the Arabic
From the publisher:
Ali, a 19-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole—is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there…. While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life and hope and love.
Samar Yazbek’s spellbinding novel, Where the Wind Calls Home, tells the story of Ali—a wounded soldier holding on to life through his visions, memories, and hallucinations in the span of half a day during the Syrian civil war. The emerging mindscape is as radiant as it is reeling, unfurling the lyric beauty of Ali’s mystical commune with nature alongside the tragic reality of human devastation. Leri Price’s translation is an extraordinary feat of restraint, beautifully recreating Yazbek’s hypnotic language in English.
