Yazbek’s is not a crafted memoir but an immediate record of three months of fear, torture, intimidation and, eventually, flight from her home told through diaries that stop and start, sometimes repeat, and always offer another detail of popular will and regime cruelty. Its importance is in its existence, the effort of so many Syrians to share their stories and Yazbek’s own courage and ability to record them. It is a hard, painful read, not only for what Yazbek witnesses and suffers but also for that of the other Syrians that she interviews. Their testimonies come through on the page as atrocities happen all around her.

“No one in the village wants to really give him any information. The survivors speak of generalities or give him conflicting versions of what happened. “People talk, just as they please,” says Kamleh, Elias’ mother, “you will not obtain anything for them, they will lie to you. Anyone who has lost a relative up there, tries to make a hero out of him… And who was himself up there and has flown the coop, does not know what to say, they rather remain silent.””

Although June rain has a few lengths, it is an exciting, successful literary novel. In some ways it’s a coming of age novel from the Middle East, one that leaves no doubt about the central role of family militant organizations in the Lebanese civil war.

Khaled Khalifa’s In praise of hatred is now out in English!

IT was not yet 5 on Tuesday morning. I was lying on one side of the bed and the two little girls I was watching were on the other. None of us had slept a wink. Snipers’ gunfire rang out from time to time; bombs were crashing all around us. The girls’ frightened mother entered the room. “The bombing is getting worse,” she said.

We ran out, heading downstairs. Women and children and some men had gathered in the shelter. The children were now capable of distinguishing between the sound of bombs and gunfire, between distant and nearby shelling, and they could discern the direction from which it was all coming