While the story is ostensibly a domestic one about the narrator and her wealthy household of aunts who must choose between a life of self-denying spinsterhood or rebellious marriage, at its core it is about violence: the religiously motivated violence of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the counter-violence inflicted by a secular government. The two forces are locked into a mutual cycle of hatred, each atrocity sparking the next.

She interviewed protesters, doctors, neighbours and defectors about what was happening in the streets, prisons and hospitals of her country, what they saw and what was done to them, often finding that after they had talked to her, they disappeared. She never pretends that she is being heroic, although her persistence sometimes feels foolhardy. This week the book was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, given annually to a British writer who, as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel speech, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world (this year, Carol Ann Duffy), and shared with an international writer who has been persecuted for speaking out about their

The PEN Pinter Prize was established in 2009 in memory of the Nobel-winning playwright Harold Pinter. The Prize is awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit who, in the words of Harold Pinter’s Nobel speech, casts an ‘unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world, and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’.

As an outcome of her successful tour in the US, Samar Yazbek’s book was on September 16th, ranked #1 in its category!

Refusing to play Assad’s sectarian games in Syria
By David Ignatius, for the Washington Post, September 19th, 2012
If you want to put a face on the Syrian revolution, try an activist named Samar Yazbek. I had a chance to talk with her when she visited Washington this week, and she brought the cause of the opposition — and its raw human passion for liberation — into focus.

The aunts are gloriously vivacious and nuanced creations, from Maryam, at war with her own “filthy and rebellious” body, to Marwa, a Juliet figure, chained to her bed to prevent her marrying an officer of the other sect. As party spies multiply, a geography teacher has her clothes torn off for failing a pupil from a Mukhabarat family. In the siege of Aleppo, a fugitive throws himself into a red-hot bakery furnace rather than risk torture. A secret police chief modelled on the president’s brother is a chilling cameo.