Blogs in June 2014

B as in Beirut 20th June 2014

The four interlocking narratives that make up this extraordinary novel belong to four women who live in the same apartment building in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. There is Lilian with her two children, desperate to emigrate, with...

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De Niro’s Game 1st January 1970

Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown up on the Christian side of war-torn Beirut. Now on the verge of adulthood, they must choose their futures: to remain in the exhausted, corrupt city of their birth,...

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Bye Bye Babylon 1st January 1970

In 1975 I was seven years old, and loved the Bazooka bubble-gums my mother would buy for Walid and me in Spinney’s supermarket… Beirut in the 1970s is a paradise. Wealthy families ride escalators and fill shopping carts with...

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Jasmine and Fire 1st January 1970

As Beirut exploded with the bombs and violence of a ruthless civil war in the ’80s, a nine-year-old Salma Abdelnour and her family fled Lebanon to start a new life in the States. Ever since then- even as she...

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A Girl Made of Dust 1st January 1970

A novel is a coming of age book, set in a village outside Beirut and follows the escalating conflict in Lebanon through the eyes of the young girl, Ruba.

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