The arsonists' city

Review by Booklist Review

A dispersed Lebanese-Syrian family gathers in Beirut to halt the sale of their ancestral home, exposing unhealed wounds but also new opportunities for connection. Having escaped the Lebanese Civil War and settled in California, faded actress Mazna and her surgeon husband, Idris, are bickering their way into old age when a transplanted heart whispers to Idris that it's time to sell the crumbling family estate. Their grown children sense the gravity of the moment and oppose the sale but are preoccupied by their own problems. Ava in Park Slope suspects her husband of infidelity, Mimi in Austin can't get his music career off the ground, and Naj, still in Lebanon, parties listlessly and longs for forbidden fruit. The family's reluctant reunion underscores the distance between its members but also the persistence of the centripetal forces pulling them together. Interspersing scenes from Mazna's youth among present-day moments of chaos and conflict, Alyan (Salt Houses, 2017) points to patterns of secrecy and shame and the power of buried trauma to leap beyond displacement and time. Acute psychological insight and a sense of Beirut as a fluid, evolving entity further amplify the power of this moving family drama.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Poet and novelist Alyan (Salt Houses) illuminates in this exquisite novel the recent history of Lebanon and Syria through the intimate tragedies and betrayals befalling one family. After Lebanese American heart surgeon Idris Nasr's father dies, Idris feels compelled to sell the family's ancestral home in Beirut. His Syrian-born wife, Mazna and their three adult children--Ava, Mimi, and Naj--fear he's making a mistake, and they gather in Beirut to host a memorial and discuss the sale. All of the children harbor jealousies of various kinds and hide secrets from one another and from their parents, but no secrets are bigger or more potentially devastating than those carried by Mazna, and they gradually emerge in flashbacks of her life before she married Idris. The family conflict plays out over the summer of 2019, and the narrative alternates with scenes from Mazna and Idris's lives in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and in California during the early years of their marriage. "We don't choose what we belong to," Mazna considers near the novel's end, and in Alyan's sweeping yet intimate narrative, this thought holds true for the characters' relationships to family and country alike. Tenderly and compassionately told, and populated with complicated and flawed characters, the Nasrs' story interrogates nostalgia, memory, and the morality of keeping secrets against the backdrop of a landscape and a people in constant flux. Alyan's debut was striking, and this one's even better. (Mar.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Alyan's riveting novel, set in America and the Middle East, brims with overlapping memories of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties within a seemingly assimilated Syrian Lebanese American family. In 1978, young Palestinian Zakaria is assassinated in a refugee camp in Beirut, the victim of a factional revenge killing during Lebanon's civil war. Weeks before, Zakaria had betrayed his best friend, Lebanese Idris, with Idris' Syrian girlfriend, Mazna. Spelled out in the first pages, these facts will haunt the novel as their impact on members of the Nasr family comes to light. Cut to present-day California, where cardiac surgeon Idris Nasr lives with Mazna, whom he married not long after Zakaria's death. Their three grown children, born and raised in America, take their parents' perpetually rocky 40-year marriage for granted. And as they first avoid, then succumb to Mazna's entreaties to convene in Beirut--supposedly to hold a memorial service for Idris' recently deceased father but really to protest against Idris' selling the ancestral home he's just inherited--all three are hiding problems from their parents. In Brooklyn, almost 40-year-old microbiologist Ava suspects her WASP husband is having an affair; in Austin, Mimi, 32, has cheated on his long-suffering girlfriend and been dumped by the band he started; almost 30-year-old Naj, an internationally famous singer/musician, has yet to tell her parents she's gay. Meanwhile, Mazna, whose passions for Zakaria and her aborted career as an actress have never died, has spent her marriage betraying and being betrayed by Idris, depending upon yet resenting him. And Idris, a man of privileged self-importance and some charm, is perhaps more self-aware than his family realizes. Palestinian American psychologist and writer Alyan is masterful at clarifying the complicated sociopolitical realities surrounding Lebanon's and Syria's intertwined histories in terms of class, caste, colonialism, and tribalism. But even more masterful here--as in Salt Houses (2017), which portrayed the Palestinian diaspora through four generations of a single family--is her laserlike focus on her multifaceted characters in big and small moments that come together to create a singular family. Painful and joyous, sad and funny--impossible to put down. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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The Wrong Ghosts Tonight the man will die. In some ways, the city already seems resigned to it, the Beirut dusk uncharacteristically flat, cloudy, a peculiar staleness rippling through the trees like wind. It's easy to costume the earth for grief, and tonight the birds perched upon the tangled electricity wires look like mourners in their black and white feathers, staring down at the concrete refugee camps without song.   There are orange trees in the courtyard, planted by the children the previous year; the NGO workers had wanted something bright and encouraged the youngest children to tie cheap ribbons to the branches, but they'd forgotten about the muddy season, and now the ribbons flap limply, streaked in dirt.   The man himself--Zakaria--knows it, or doesn't. He notices the queer feeling of the camps, the way his mother's makloubeh tastes perfectly fine but seems to be saltless, the meat stringier than usual. His sisters are gathered in the living room, cross-legged on the carpet, his mother's mother's carpet, the one that earned them a cuff on the ear back when they were children if they dropped crumbs or spilled Coke on it. You think my mama, Allah rest her soul, Allah take her and Allah keep her, hauled this on her back, her back , all the way from Jerusalem to Ramallah to Amman to this godforsaken armpit of the world so that her heathen grandchildren could spill soda on it? His mother hates the camps, hates Beirut, all of Lebanon, hates their neighbors, the aunties with their tattling and boring lives, always reminding her children, We used to have gardens in Palestine, trees that belonged to us.   His sisters are watching an Egyptian soap opera, one of their favorites, the one where the ingénue is kept from her love interest by his wicked mother. The screen is cracked from where one of his sisters--they always disagree about which one--threw a curling iron at it years ago, and it slices the starlet's torso in two as she cries on a park bench.   "What's wrong with you today?" Zakaria's mother asks him.   "Nothing," he lies. "I'm just not hungry." The truth is he's distracted. Something is nagging at him as it does when he forgets a song, the wispiest tune tugging at him. He thinks of the house across the city, the one where his mother has worked as a housekeeper for twenty years, the one he spent countless afternoons playing in as a boy with the son of the owner, the courtyard they'd transform into a battlefield, an ocean of sharks, lava. Idris was his first friend, his closest friend.   Whenever Zakaria thinks of the house, he sees it at dawn, the hour his mother would arrive for her daily duties after taking two buses from the south and walking from the final bus stop through the West Beirut streets, ignoring the vendors selling cigarettes and that sweet candy that made his teethe ache, to reach the gate, always latched, always easily unlocked.   He loved playing with Idris, of course, but he also loved those first couple of hours when the house was still quiet with the sleeping family, when his mother would fill buckets with warm soapy water to toss across the veranda, take down clothes she'd hung to dry in the garden the day before, whispering to him, "Silent as a mouse." When he was alone in the courtyard, it became his; he was the ruler of this inexplicable, beautiful place, a house with four bedrooms, bathtub faucets the shape of swans' necks.   Tonight he feels the house beckoning him with an invisible hand, feels greedy for those rooms, the silk-soft sheets that he'd slept in many times. But his best friend isn't speaking to him, their recent fight still raw as a burn, the insults they'd hurled at each other still echoing, each saying and not-saying the truth.   "You know what you did," Idris had finally said. "I trusted you. I've always trusted you."   Zakaria had fallen silent at that. He felt guilty and yet also unrepentant--how to apologize for the only truly good thing that'd ever happened to him?--which Idris had sniffed out like a dog. He'd called him a traitor.   "Not even a little plate?" his mother asks now, interrupting his thoughts.   "I'm just not hungry," Zakaria repeats. To stave off further questions, he tries to appear absorbed in the soap opera that his sisters, sprawled on the large sofa, are watching. The three girls are younger than him, all unmarried, with large noses and dark curly hair. They are branches of the same tree, rooted and yet always apart from him.   He must fall asleep at some point. Excerpted from The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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