No one prayed over their graves

Three-time nominee for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and National Book Award finalist Khalifa (Death Is Hard Work, 2016) is a Syrian novelist doing meaningful work. The unforgettable opening of this novel, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, describes the mass death and destruction in the village of Hosh Hanna from a flood in 1907. Having spent the night in nearby Aleppo, close friends Hanna and Zakariya return home to be forever changed. Spanning from the 1880s to the 1950s and following a multigenerational cast, the novel requires a reader's close attention through the complex threading of causes, effects, and personal choices within a geopolitical context. While a novel of men and women at a time of war and change, the male gaze shapes the novel, with sex workers dismissible from the narrative and in sentences like, "He hurled vulgar insults at her [during sex], and she enjoyed it." Existential to its core, this novel shows how two men are forever shaped by the death of their village.

National Book Award finalist Khalifa (Death Is Hard Work) returns with a lyrical if laborious story of multicultural Aleppo, Syria, that spans from the 1880s to the 1950s. In 1881, Hanna, a wealthy Christian boy, is orphaned at age eight when a revenge killing claims all the other members of his family in his small village. He is spirited away by a loyal servant and taken in by his Muslim friend Zakariya's family in Aleppo. In 1907, Hanna and Zakariya, who have both married, are visiting a brothel when a flood wrecks their homes. Hanna loses his wife and son, while Zakariya's wife survives, but is a mere ghost of her former self, grieving their drowned child. Tormented by guilt, Hanna turns to a life of asceticism. Because of his visions and miracles attributed to him, a messianic cult grows up around him, to his consternation. Through famine, plague, and the Armenian holocaust, which Hanna and Zakariya become aware of after encountering refugees during WWI, the main characters and their descendants persist. Though the ambitious narrative doesn't always cohere, it's carried along by Khalifa's ornate writing, often in the style of Middle Eastern classical poetry and lucidly translated by Price, and by such recurring themes as the supremacy of love over sensual pleasure, power, and religion. Though baggy, there's beauty on each page. (July)

An elegantly written multigenerational novel set in 19th- and early-20th-century Syria. Khalifa, the most prominent Syrian writer at work today (albeit in exile), opens with a scarifying moment from history: a 1907 flood that swept away a small town along the Euphrates River. There are few survivors. Two are friends, the Christian Hanna Gregoros and the Muslim Zakariya Bayazidi, both of whom were away at the time; of those at home, only Bayazidi's wife, Shaha Sheikh Musa, and Mariana Nassar lived through the flood. The destruction is total, and both friends lose their sons. For his part, "Hanna felt like the flood hadn't just drowned his wife and son; it had drowned all his sordid and uproarious past, his entire life." Sordid it was, and Bayazidi, less inclined to repentance, was only too glad to take part in the brothel visits and drunken nights that, even before the flood, Hanna was tiring of, although he had committed to building a citadel of sin with, as Bayazidi says, "a stage especially for suicides." With a star-crossed artist friend named William Eisa, their Xanadu on the Euphrates grows until the disaster changes everything, whereupon Mariana takes a more central role in the story. It's not the first catastrophe to have struck the village, as Khalifa writes, taking the friends to their childhood a quarter-century earlier and a massacre of Christians by the Ottoman government; nor will it be the last, as plague and famine strike and religious fundamentalism hardens, foreshadowing the horrors that have beset Syria in our own time. The Syria Khalifa evokes is one where Muslims, Christians, and Jews, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs overlook their differences to forge friendships and family ties; and although his storyline sometimes wanders between seemingly disconnected episodes, the extraordinary closing pages, poetic and prophetic, speak to the possibility of building a "kingdom where life is fresh and tender and the fish never die." A small epic that blends magic realism with grim realities, always memorably. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.