The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria - Hardcover

Yazbek, Samar

3.97

1,027 ratings by Goodreads

9781846044861: The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846044863 ISBN 13: 9781846044861

Publisher: Ebury Press, 2015

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Samar Yazbek was well-known in her native Syria as a writer and a journalist but, in 2011, she fell foul of the Assad regime and was forced to flee. Since then, determined to bear witness to the suffering of her people, she bravely revisited her homeland by squeezing through a hole in the fence on the Turkish border. In The Crossing, she testifies to the appalling reality that is Syria today. From the first innocent demonstrations for democracy, through the beginnings of the Free Syrian Army, to the arrival of ISIS, she offers remarkable snapshots of soldiers, children, and ordinary men and women simply trying to stay alive. Some of these stories are of hardship and brutality that is hard to bear, but she also gives testimony to touches of humanity along the way: how people live under the gaze of a sniper, how principled young men try to resist orders from their military superiors, how children cope in bunkers. . . Yazbek's portraits of life in Syria are very real, and her prose, luminous. The Crossing is undoubtedly both an important historical document and a work of literature.

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About the Author:

Samar Yazbek studied literature before beginning her career as a journalist and scriptwriter for Syrian television and cinema. Her translated work includes the novel Cinnamon; she is also the author of A Woman in the Crossfire, her diaries of the first four months of the Syrian uprising.

Review:

"Powerful and moving . . . bears comparison with George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia as a work of literature, Yazbek is a superb narrator. . . it may be that [she] has written one of the first political classics of the 21st century." —Observer

"Brave, rebellious and passionate . . . Yazbek is no ordinary Syrian dissident." —Financial Times

"An eloquent, gripping and harrowing account of the country’s decline into barbarism by an incredibly brave Syrian." —Irish Times

"Gripping . . . Does the important job of putting faces to the numbing numbers of Syria’s crisis." —Economist

“In The Crossing [Yazbek] returns and blends the skills of a novelist with those of a journalist to precisely register physical and psychological details, draw telling character sketches, and evoke the surreal terrors of a world tipped upside down. . . Syrian horrors and hopes almost defy description. Samar Yazbek’s passion and literary skill somehow manage to do them justice.” —Daily Beast

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