SAMAR YAZBEK is a Syrian writer, novelist, and journalist. She was born in Jableh in 1970 and studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and a scriptwriter for Syrian television and film. Her novel Planet of Clay, also published by World Editions, was a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Warwick Women in Translation Prize. Her accounts of the Syrian conflict include A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Yazbek's work has been translated into multiple languages and has been recognized with numerous awards--notably, the French Best Foreign Book Award and the PEN-Oxfam Novib, PEN Tucholsky, and PEN Pinter awards. She was recently selected to be part of the International Writers Program with the Royal Society of Literature.

LERI PRICE is an award-winning literary translator of contemporary Arabic fiction. Price's translation of Khaled Khalifa's Death Is Hard Work was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and winner of the 2020 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. Her translation of Khaled Khalifa's No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was shortlisted for the ALTA National Translation Award. Price's other recent translations include Sarab by award-winning writer Raja Alem.

Praise for Samar Yazbek

"One of Syria's most gifted novelists." -CNN

"Yazbek's is the urgent task of showing the world what is happening. Thanks to her, we can read about the appalling things that go on in secret, underground places." --The Guardian

Praise for Where the Wind Calls Home

"The potent latest
from Yazbek (Planet of Clay) weighs the consequences of the Syrian civil
war after a 19-year-old soldier, Ali, survives his patrol station's 2013
bombing in the Lattakia mountains.This slim novel packs a punch." --Publishers Weekly

"Where the Wind Calls Home, Syrian author Samar Yazbek's latest novel to be translated into English, is a stunning offering of spirituality, memory, and all those implacable, liminal spaces wherein only the mind may venture." --Asymptote Journal

"In this compact, stream-of-consciousness narrative, 19-year-old Ali, a conscript in the Syrian Army fighting in the civil war that's ravaged the country for more than a decade, lingers between life and death after a bomb accidentally falls on the position he shares with four comrades. Yazbek, a Syrian journalist and screenwriter who's written previously about the war in both fiction and nonfiction, returns repeatedly to vivid imagery of trees, rivers, sky, and other aspects of the natural world that are central elements in defining Ali's character and experience. His broken body lies beneath a large tree that evokes memories of a more than 500-year-old oak tree that stood next to the prayer space in his village, and in which he once constructed a kind of dwelling with the assistance of his mother, Nahla. Yazbek efficiently paints a portrait of her sympathetic protagonist, a young man possessed of both strong religious impulses and a rebellious streak that exposes him to beatings both at school and at home." --Kirkus Reviews

"An evocative, if slow-paced, meditation about people caught in the turning wheel of Syria's violent present." --Kirkus Reviews

""Where the Wind Calls Home introduces us to Ali, a 19-year-old Syrian soldier on the brink of life and death, vividly portrayed by the talented novelist and journalist Samar Yazbek. Ali, lying beneath a timeless tree, grapples with memories oscillating between joy and pain. He's unsure if the body being laid to rest is his or another's, consumed by haunting uncertainty. Award-winning translator Leri Price renders Yazbek's exploration of war's devastation, the allure of Ali's traditional Alawite village, and the profound connection between Ali and his surroundings in English." --About Her

"Yazbek's well-paced and intimate novel reveals the traumas of war and being a soldier." --Arab News

"An authentic funeral dirge, ode to a world condemned to disappearance under the combined effects of the tyranny of the regime and the civil war, perhaps the most beautiful novel that we can read by Samar Yazbek to date." --Le Monde

"From the simple story of a soldier who is subjected to friendly fire and relives moments from the span of his life as he hovers between life and death, Yazbek conveys her reader to the true story that constitutes the novel within her novel: the story of nature merging with a person more like a son to her, at the

Publisher: World Editions

Pub date: 2024-02-06

Length: 194 pages