The novelist regrets that the opposition movement has evolved from its peaceful origin. She refuses to condone, let alone applaud, armed uprisings. “Isn’t political opposition the better alternative?” she meekly suggests.

The other woman laughs in her face and rejects her logic. “What are you waiting for, you futile scribbler, when more than 100,000 people lie dead and thousands are imprisoned or missing?”

All of a sudden, I found myself beneath the guillotine wherever I turned.

Having for so many years thought myself capable of claiming my freedom as a woman – despite facing various forms of oppression – I was being stripped of my sense of self, falling repeatedly from the sky down into the devil’s abyss.

The extent of the barbarity that exists in this world is beyond anyone’s imagination.

“Syrian women were among the first to participate in the public resistance of Assad and they are still participating in the revolution.  I think women are the ones who will pay the price of what’s happened first – they have already been abused by Assad’s followers in civilian areas and in refugee camps.  Hence why I say that, up to the day Assad falls, we should strive to make sure women are not deprived of their rights and are allowed to participate in political, social and economic life. This is because I am worried of the emergence of a radical Islamic movement, not a moderate one, which will have a negative influence on the Syrian woman. Our mission is to make Assad go and then to crush religious fanaticism and radicalism and this will take a very long time. Our road is very long.”

Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa continues in his new novel No Knives in this City’s Kitchens what he begun in his previous masterpiece, In Praise of Hatred (2006) — excavating contemporary Syrian society’s memory.

He starts from what one family has gone through in Aleppo, which he describes as the punished city, while In Praise of Hatred focused on the distortions made by death squads or the “Party Action Squads” in the psyches of its members during the events in Hama in the 1980s. The novel explores the price paid by Syrians for living parallel to the life of the ruling party for near half a century.

Samar Yazbek, at Dartington’s Ways With Words: “We are going to need multiple revolutions. We have had dictators and now we have extremists. But we have the backbone to our society that means there could be a great democracy. We just have to keep fighting.”

The 260 pages novel details life under the Asad regime, in the period spanning from the early 60’s, to 2005.