The Crossing: My journey to the shattered heart of Syria

ISBN-13: 9781846044885 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 288 str.

Samar Yazbek

Opis

Powerful insight into the effects of civil war on the Syrian people, by the award-winning Syrian journalist.
Samar Yazbek was well known in her native Syria as a writer and a journalist but, in 2011, she fell foul of the Assad regime and was forced to flee.
Since then, determined to bear witness to the suffering of her people, she bravely revisited her homeland by squeezing through a hole in the fence on the Turkish border. In The Crossing, she testifies to the appalling reality that is Syria today. From the first innocent demonstrations for democracy, through the beginnings of the Free Syrian Army, to the arrival of ISIS, she offers remarkable snapshots of soldiers, children, ordinary men and women simply trying to stay alive... Some of these stories are of hardship and brutality that is hard to bear, but she also gives testimony to touches of humanity along the way: how people live under the gaze of a sniper... how principled young men try to resist orders from their military superiors... how children cope in the bunkers.
Yazbek's portraits of life in Syria are very real, her prose is luminous. The Crossing is undoubtedly both an important historical document and a work of literature.

Recenzje

Powerful and moving...bears comparison with George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia as a work of literature, Yazbek is a superb narrator...it may be that [she] has written one of the first political classics of the 21st century Observer

O autorze

Born in 1970, Samar Yazbek studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and cinema. Her translated work includes the novel, Cinnamon, and A Woman In The Crossfire, her diaries of the first four months of the Syrian uprising, which has won many prizes. She lives in Paris.