This is a review of Douaihy’s latest nove by Claire Mazaleyrat, published on the blog “L’avis des livres”, September 6th, 2015.
“At a time when the decline of the city, and the ancient ties that ordered its social hierarchies are crumbling along streets fallen in decrepitude, past allegiances mark the end of a world. It is in this context that the reader follows the path of the novel’s characters, torn between family loyalties and the call of new sirens.”

Published by Le vif l’express, August 28th, 2015
The tale Lebanese writer Jabbour Douaihy writes in in The American neighborhood is not yet home to the tensions between Sunnis and Shiites that it will become after being contaminated by the Syrian conflict. But the rise of radical Islamism, which is the book’s backbone, is already an important sign.

Oscar Brox, for Detour, July 2015.
Approximate translation!
Back to the past, to follow the traces of time, and collect the voices of other lives. Memory has some frustrating puzzles the pieces of which refuse to fit. However many documents we collect, testimonies and details to provide their nuances, the past is never lived again with the same intensity…

By Barry Andrews, for Irish Times, August 2, 2015
Barry Andrews of Goal salutes an eloquent, gripping and harrowing account by an incredibly brave Syrian of her country’s decline into barbarism.
The war in Syria is in its fifth year and it is estimated that 230,000 people have died in the conflict. This book is an eloquent, gripping and harrowing account of the country’s decline into barbarism by an incredibly brave Syrian.

Review by The Press & Journal, July 29th, 2015
The Crossing documents [Yazbek’s] three return visits to Syria between 2012 and 2013. This was a period during which the Syrian people were desperately fighting for survival, both against the Assad regime and the brutal and unforgiving force of emerging Jihadist groups.

A review by Roula Khalaf, for the Financial Times, July 17, 2015
Samar Yazbek is no ordinary Syrian dissident. Brave, rebellious and passionate in her advocacy of democratic change, she was born into the Alawite sect, the minority to which the Assad clan belongs. Branded as a traitor by Assad loyalists, this novelist, journalist and screenwriter has become a chronicler of the civil war that ravages a country now trapped between a brutal but resilient regime and an equally vicious jihadi insurgency.
In The Crossing, Yazbek recounts her trips back to the ruins …