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Description
On 21 August 2013, Kassem Eid nearly died in a sarin gas attack in the town of Moadamiya. At least 1,500 people were killed. Later that day he was hit by a mortar while helping the Free Syrian Army fight government forces. He survived that too. But the devastation wrought on his friends, his neighbours and his home transformed them into something unrecognisable, horrifying.
Born to Palestinian immigrants, Kassem Eid remembers moving to Moadamiya in 1989, at the age of three. The streets where he and his eleven siblings played were fragrant with jasmine. But he soon realised that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal regime. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000, hopes that he would ease its severity were swiftly crushed.
Breathtakingly powerful, this brave, deeply felt memoir illuminates the realities of growing up in a corrupt dictatorship; the strictures of living under siege for a year; the impact of unspeakable violence; and how Kassem Eid rallied worldwide support through a highly-publicised hunger strike to break the siege of cities across Syria. It is a searing account of oppression, war, survival and escape – and an eloquent howl against the destruction of a nation as the world turned its face away.
Product details
| Published | 01 Aug 2018 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 224 |
| ISBN | 9781408895122 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Illustrations | B&W map illustrations |
| Dimensions | 216 x 135 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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A memoir of resistance and survival unique in the annals of modern war … If the shedding of blood can be beautiful in words, he makes it so
Wall Street Journal
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At last, here is the first wave of books written by Syrians not about their escape to Europe as refugees from the war but about their lives inside the country … What emerges is a remarkably unified picture of the realities of life since 1970 in the Syria of the Assads … shows, unambiguously, precisely what the Assad government seeks to conceal
Times Literary Supplement
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A valuable perspective absent from much of what has already been written on Syria ... An epic view of what Syria was and has become
Arab Weekly
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An account of oppression, war, survival and escape as the world ignored what was going on. A touching tale, this humanises the story of war when often all we want to do is look away
Metro, The best new books by BME authors you'll be reading this year
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Eid's story is one of hope giving way to fear and finally betrayal, a narrative of one of this century's darkest episodes, a necessary perspective, made more prescient because it is persona
The National
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Gripping, hauntingly raw, and a testament to his resilience
The Intercept















