TMR editors have compiled a list of 30 of their favorite titles on Syria, including novels, nonfiction, and memoir.
Fiction
Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price (World Editions, 2024) A meditative stream of conscious novel. A badly wounded, hallucinating 19-year-old conscript in the Syrian army remembers his mountain village and the language of trees.
No One Prayed Over Their Graves by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price (FSG, 2023). The Guardian called the novel: “a vast, sprawling saga that depicts, among other things, the birth pangs of modern Syria.”
As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh (Little Brown, 2022) A coming of age novel for a young Syrian woman during the Syrian war. She has to make a decision whether to leave the country or stay.
The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette (Vintage, 2021) Two women tell the story of Syria’s brutal repression, one in real life and the other in an unpublished manuscript within the novel.
Death Is Hard Work by Khaled Khalifa, translated by Leri Price (FSG, 2020) Before a father who fought for the Syrian revolution dies, he requests his body to be buried in his village. A journey that should have taken hours becomes an arduous march through Syria’s war-torn countryside, during which the dead man’s estranged children come to understand their country and themselves better.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri (Zaffre/Bonnier Books, 2020) A story of love, nature, and simple lives upended by war.
The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar (Weidenfelt and Nicholson, 2018). The power of storytelling for a young refugee woman from Homs, who takes solace in the wanderings of an apprentice to the famous tenth century mapmaker Al Idrisi.
Breaking Knees: Sixty-Three Very Short Stories from Syria by Zakaria Tamer, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (Garnet Publishing/Periscope, 2016) Zakaria Tamer was writing the very short story “al-qissa al-qasira jjiddan” before fast fiction became an established genre. In this collection Tamer explores relations between men, women, and state emblems like statues; one story even has a talking cat, about to explode in the country’s pressure cooker of totalitarianism.
The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami, translated by Anthea Bell (Haus Publishing, 2010). Three generations endure the Syrian Gulag. Schami’s is one of first Syrian novels to reveal the historic roots of torture from the East German Stasi police that became commonplace in Assad’s prisons.
Menstruation by Ammar Abdulhamid (Saqi Books, 2001) A daring first novel by a former fundamentalist that explores repressive sexuality in a hyper-religious mentality.
Memoir
The Home I Worked To Make by Wendy Pearlman (W.W. Norton, 2024) Author of a previous book that interviewed Syrian refugees, We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria, here the writer interviews 38 Syrians abroad — war forced millions of Syrians from their homes. It also forced them to rethink the meaning of home itself.
My Country: A Syrian Memoir by Kassem Eid (Bloomsbury, 2018) Surviving arrest and a sarin gas chemical weapons attack in the town of Moadamiya, Eid was hit by a mortar in a firefight between the Free Syrian Army and regime forces. A moving testimonial that includes a foreword by Janine di Giovanni.
Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War by Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple (One World, 2018) A young man comes of age during the Syrian war and discovers the meaning of home, kinship, and identity. Drawings by the activist artist Molly Crabapple.
The Home That Was Our Country: A Memoir Of Syria by Alia Malik (2017) An Yacoubian Building-like tale except this time the building is in the heart of Damascus, where Syrian lives entwine and shatter during war.
My House In Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis by Diana Darke (Haus Publishing, 2016) The author’s house that she bought and restored in a mixed Sunni/ Shi’a neighbourhood of the walled Old City of Damascus becomes an opportunity to explore the rich architecture, art, and design of Syria. During the war, Darke’s home provides a refuge for friends.
Nonfiction
Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria by Shayna M. Silverstein (University of Wesleyan Press, 2024) Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and digital research, academic Silverstein unpicks the many layers of the dabke dance, to reveal interlocking layers of gender, class, ethnicity, and authoritarianism in Syria.
Understanding Syria through Forty Monuments: A Story of Survival by Ross Burns (Bloomsbury, 2024) Archaeological treasures act as a prism though which to understand Syria’s 4,000-year history. With over 200 illustrations.
Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State by Dawn Chatty (Hurst Publishers, 2021) As Diana Darke writes, “An admirably clear exposition of how and why Syria embraced millions of Muslim and Christian refugees from the disintegrating Ottoman Empire and how and why, in the current war, displaced Syrians were met with reciprocal hospitality in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, but large-scale rejection in the West.”
Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System by Ugur Ümit Üngör, Jaber Baker (Bloomsbury, 2023) From Aleppo to Hama and Homs to Damascus and other towns in between where the branches of the security services maintained their own prisons, thousands of prisoners, men, women and children, streamed out of detention onto the streets earlier this week. Gulag shows the extent of detainment, imprisonment, and torture that took place during the Assads’ 54-year-long dictatorship. Essential reading.
Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria by Ammar Azzouz (Bloomsbury, 2023) What the Israelis are doing in Gaza, the Russians did in Syria: raze entire cities to the ground. Architect and artist Azzouz explores the theory of domicide through notions of home and displacement of the millions of Syrians internally and externally displaced during the conflict.
No Turning Back: Life, Loss and Hope In Wartime Syria by Rania Abouzeid (One World, 2019) This book, awarded New York Time Notable Books of 2018, is in depth reporting from Syria’s killing fields by the intrepid, award-winning independent Lebanese Australian journalist.
The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh, translated by Ibtihal Mahmood (Hurst, 2017) Under Hafez Assad, Syria’s leading intellectual and revolutionary thinker Yassin al-Haj Saleh was imprisoned from 1980 to 1996. At the start of the Syrian revolution in 2011, he went into hiding moving from city to town, eluding the shabiha, the country’s notorious intelligence services. In 2013, his wife Samira Khalil, a detainee herself and political activist disappeared with the human rights lawyer and civil society activist Razan Zaitouneh, after armed men raided the Violations Document Center, in Douma. In hiding al-Haj Saleh wrote over 380 articles, which provide the basis for this book, which includes a foreword by Robin Yassin Kassab.
Burning Country. Syrians in Revolution and War by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Leila Al-Shami (Pluto, 2016) Featuring testimonies from opposition fighters, refugees, and human rights activists among many others, Yassin Kassab and Al-Shami chart the brutalization of the conflict and the militarization of the uprising, the rise of the Islamists and sectarian warfare, and the role of governments in Syria and elsewhere in aiding and abetting the violence.
The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria by Samar Yazbek, translated by Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp (Rider/Ebury 2015) In 2012, the Free Syrian Army and it supporters were fighting a revolution for regime change in Syria. Again the best reporting comes from a Middle Eastern woman journalist. Yazbek repeatedly snuck across borders, daring to report a war that many others ignored.
The Kurds of Syria: Political Parties and Identity In the Middle East by Harriet Allsopp (Bloomsbury, 2015) An exploration of the fundamental issues of minority identity and being “stateless” in a turbulent region.
Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria by Lisa Wedeen (Univerisity of Chicago Press, 2015) A tour de force in reading Syrian cartoons, art, and political propaganda to reveal how a nation of people feined obediance and compliance. But like the victims of a cult they sought to undermine the chains that held them fast.
Syria Speaks: Art and Culture From the Frontline edited by Malu Halasa, Zaher Omareen and Nawara Mahfoud (Saqi Books, 2014) With its 33 contributors, the book was the first to document the creative outpouring of the Syrian revolution, from graffiti and political posters to art and photography.
Damascus: Taste of a City by Rafik Schami and Marie Fadel (Haus Publishing, 2010) Rafik Schami in exile in Germany asks his sister Marie Fadel to revisit for him the culinary delights of Syria. She calls him on the phone and he inscribes her meals, snacks and foodie adventures in mouth-watering detail.
The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie: Intimacy and Design by Malu Halasa and Rana Salam (Chronicle Books, 2009) The authors went into the racy lingerie factories of Damascus and interviewed the men who design and sell the lingerie for religious conservative female clientele. Lavishly illustrated with lingerie still-lifes by Gilbert Hage the book includes never before seen product photography that shows how revealing lingerie is modeled and marketed locally.
Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official by miriam cooke (Duke University Press, 2007) Interviews with playwrights, filmmakers and the writers of prison literature shed insight into “a community of conscience,” which sometimes had to negotiate a fine line between genuine criticism of a regime and co-option by government propaganda.
Thank you for this valuable and important list. I would like to add some titles about the Christian communities of Syria:
Assyrians and Two World Wars by Ismael and Michael
Syrian Armenians and the Turkish Factor: Kessab, Aleppo and Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian War by Mollica and Hakobyan
Life within the Armenian Community of Aleppo by Hagopian