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A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home.
The Nasr family is spread across the globe—Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut—a constant touchstone—and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.
The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets—lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame—that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.
In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that "fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us" (NPR).
Alyan writes well and with insight, but the pacing stumbles in places. While most of the book proceeds slowly and methodically, the ending feels overly rushed, with too many loose ends wrapped up hastily. And while Mazna and Idris's story is genuinely absorbing, my interest flagged in the portions of the book dealing with the private lives of the Nasr children. Despite some flaws in execution, however, The Arsonists' City is a compelling, multidimensional portrayal of the messy complexities of family life, and fans of character-driven novels will find this ambitious — if uneven — intergenerational drama to be a rewarding read...continued
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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
Located on the Mediterranean Sea, tiny Lebanon has the highest per capita population of Syrian refugees in the world, hosting an estimated 1.5 million who have fled from its war-torn neighbor. To put this in perspective, Lebanon is about half the size of Massachusetts with a population of just under eight million as of 2019. It has long been caught in the middle of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and has faced violence and upheaval for more than half a century as a result. Decades before the outbreak of Syria's civil war in 2011 sent an influx of people across its borders, Lebanon was already home to a sizable population of Palestinian refugees — like Zakaria and his mother Hayat in Hala Alyan's The Arsonists' City.
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