Imprint: Harvill Secker
Published: 09/04/2020
ISBN: 9781787300378
Length: 256 Pages
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 135mm
Weight: 276g
RRP: £12.99
Out of the blue, Suleima's lover sends her a book he has written. Might this be the moment she finally feels she can understand him?
An electrifying new voice from contemporary Syria on life in a climate of fear
Suleima and Nassim first meet in their therapist’s tiny waiting room in Damascus. In the city’s atmosphere of surveillance and anxiety, they begin a tenuous relationship.
Some years later, after civil war breaks out, Nassim leaves Syria for Germany. He doesn’t ask Suleima to come with him; instead, from thousands of miles away, he sends her a book he has written, a novel about a woman whose experiences are very close to her own.
As Suleima reads, her past overwhelms her. Time begins to fold in on itself, her sense of identity unravels, she has no idea what to trust – Naseem’s pages, her own memory – both – or neither? As she attempts to solve the mystery of her lover’s manuscript, she must confront what has happened to her family, to her country, and start to make sense of who she is and what she has become.
Bold, contemporary, and told with captivating immediacy, The Frightened Ones is an intimate reckoning of living with fear from an electrifying new voice.
Imprint: Harvill Secker
Published: 09/04/2020
ISBN: 9781787300378
Length: 256 Pages
Dimensions: 216mm x 135mm x 135mm
Weight: 276g
RRP: £12.99
‘THE FRIGHTENED ONES eloquently locates the crux of the Syrian experience, during a time of brutal repression. In this brilliant novel, Dima Wannous tells us the story of the revolution through the voices of two women . . . With its economy of language, this captivating novel leaves us astounded by the ability of literature to create beauty amidst pain.’
'A complex tale of revolution, displacement, delusional love . . . most memorable in surreal details and glancing tales. The analyst Kamil emerges as the novel’s quiet hero – strangely reminiscent of Dr Rieux in Camus’s The Plague'
The nerve-stretching tension and horror of life in Assad’s Syria is conveyed in this cunningly constructed novel… [The Frightened Ones] shortlisted for the Arabic International Prize for Literature, examines how fear strangles lives. It’s brutal and unsettling
A brilliant and terrifying split-personality novel... The novel is full of vivid and terrifying descriptions of the effects of fear
An eerie and sharp-eyed vision of love, anxiety, and family, and it is beautifully translated