Yazbek’s “The crossing: My journey to the shattered heart of Syria” is out in the UK today! Published by Rider Books, Ebury, Penguin Random House.
Rights to this book were also sold to
Stock, France, t0 appear in October 2015
Hanser, Nagel & Kimche, Switzerland (German),  to appear in August 2015
Ordfront, Sweden, to appear in September 2015
Cappelen Damm, Norway, to appear in the fall 2015
 
 

In The crossing, Yazbek describes the transformation of the Syrian conflict from a popular uprising to a monstrous war dominated by religious extremism. Syrians have been robbed of their revolution as the world watches in silence. 

Watch on youtube!
Yazbek: “Isis kills 10 people, and the world is outraged. Asad kills thousands, and the world watches in silence”.

Margarette Driscoll, for Sunday Times, published June 28, 2015
Photo credit: Ulf Andersen, for the Sunday Times
[ Below a few excerpts ]
The battle for Tal Abyad, a Syrian border town, was playing out as I began The Crossing. The nightly news showed weather-beaten, exhausted refugees flooding to the Turkish border, only to be turned back at the last moment by black-clad Isis fighters blocking their way to freedom. Their despair and distress were visible across the barbed wire fence.
It was somewhere along that border, one night in August 2012, that Samar …

This excerpt was published by The Guardian on June 28, 2015.
Photo credit: The Guardian, Sedat Suna, EPA
The barbed wire lacerated my back. I was trembling uncontrollably. After long hours spent waiting for nightfall, to avoid attracting the attention of Turkish soldiers, I finally raised my head and gazed up at the distant sky, darkening to black. Under the wire fence marking the line of the border a tiny burrow had been dug out, just big enough for one person. My feet sank into the soil and the barbs mauled my back …

This piece is by Andrew Hussey, for The Observer, published June 28th 2015. Read the full article here.
Photo credit: Ed Alcock for The Observer.
As she sits at a cafe table in the 7th arrondissement – elegant and intense, waving around a Gitane for emphasis – it’s hard to imagine a more Parisian figure than the writer Samar Yazbek. Except that she is speaking to me mostly in her native Syrian Arabic (we use an interpreter). And for all her wit and charm, the stories she is telling me are horrifying. …