The author manages to perfectly toe the line between trauma and comedy in a searing coming-of-age tale set in a post-civil-war city. The National, August 2020 The timing is staggering. Only a few paragraphs into Naji […]
Swedish journalist Eva Nour’s debut hones in on the human cost of a tangled, intractable conflict. The National, August 2020 One warm, moonlit night in Homs, a young photographer held his breath and stepped out […]
The National, July 2020. It’s a nightmare that has become distressingly familiar. But that doesn’t make the opening scenes in Sahar Mustafah’s debut novel any less harrowing. A shooter, radicalised by the alt-right, enters a […]
We are all doing it, aren’t we? Constantly, obsessively checking news feeds and death rates. There is even a term for this compulsive behaviour: doomscrolling. Think about it, though. Did the two hours you just […]
When Romesh Gunesekera was growing up in 1960s Sri Lanka, which was known as Ceylon at the time, his pre-teenage years were turned upside down by the death of his closest friend. This seismic event has rippled through […]