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Book Cover for: Beirut Blues, Hanan Al-Shaykh

Beirut Blues

Hanan Al-Shaykh

Asmahan writes letters - to make sense of her life and to preserve her fond memories of Beirut as it existed before civil strife destroyed it forever. Evocative, sensual, funny, and poignant, the letters - which are unlikely to ever reach their destinations - conjure up, with passion and disarming honesty, a woman's life and loves in a ravaged city, as well as her sense of being a hostage in her own country. As she writes, one story grows out of another. Vividly, passionately, and yet with clear-sighted humor, she records the astonishing details of her existence, her feelings about lovers past and present, her family, her reactions to the war and its violent social and political upheavals, as well as her relationships with other women who have responded to the chaos in radically different ways. What emerges is an intimate, engaging portrait and a delicately interwoven pattern of events and characters.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Anchor Books
  • Publish Date: Jul 1st, 1996
  • Pages: 384
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.06in - 5.24in - 0.90in - 0.63lb
  • EAN: 9780385473828
  • Categories: LiteraryEpistolaryCultural Heritage

About the Author

Hanan al-Shaykh, an award-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright, is the author of the short story collection I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops; the novels One Thousand and One Nights, The Story of Zahra, Women of Sand and Myrrh, Beirut Blues, and Only in London; and a memoir about her mother, The Locust and the Bird. She was raised in Beirut, educated in Cairo, and lives in London.

Praise for this book

"Like the best modern political novels, Beirut Blues is not a political statement, fingers are not pointed without understanding. Hanan al-Shaykh's vision is unbelieving and yet full of faith."--The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A warm and hauntingly melancholic new novel . . . [by] one of the most daring and controversial female writers of the Middle East."--San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

"A finely wrought epistolary novel of lament and loss that mourns the fate of a beloved city . . . lovely measured writing from a voice deserving to be heard."--Kirkus Reviews