Published by Livres Hebdo, June 30, 2018

“Syrian writer Samar Yazbek imagines a very metaphorical female protagonist who discovers war and the virtues of literature.”

The Blue Pen, in French “La marcheuse”, will be published end of August 2019.

Published by Dagbladet, May 11, 2018

The girl that is tied up 
Syrian Samar Yazbek expresses the horror of war in a novel that resembles a strange fairytale.

Published by Bresciaoggi, May 31, 2018
“The Frightened” live and suffer in Syria
Tearing, creeping, uninterrupted. It is fear, a devastating fury that annihilates. How to define it: state of mind, obsession, modus vivendi? Surely it is a force that takes on different connotations, from anxiety to torment to panic.

Published by La Repubblica, April 15, 2018
Love and Xanax in Damascus

He escaped to Berlin. She remained in Syria: hoping to find her brother, who has “disappeared” at the hands of the regime. But is it possible to really love each other when your survival is conditioned by fear?

Published by Avvenire, March 20, 2018
In his work the Syrian writer can not break away from the tormented city: “Despite everything, mine has never been a country prone to fanaticism: plural identity is an ancient value.”

Published by Il Manifesto, March 28, 2018
The novel about a prisoner’s life, a prisoner of violence but also of the thousand unpardonable compromises that a dictatorship imposes on oppressed individuals. There are no knives in the kitchens of this city (Bompiani, pp. 288, euro 18), tells through the life events of a family in Aleppo the genesis and consolidation of the Assad regime that dominates Syria since the Sixties, describing the internal repression and annihilation, which invites us to reflect on all forms of contemporary despotism.