Maryam: Keeper of Stories

Alawia Sobh's acclaimed Arabic novel of the Lebanese Civil War is a rare depiction of women's experience across class, sect, and generation in this region-defining conflict. Rich with everyday detail, uncovering the collusions of ordinary and extraordinary violence, and mixing female voices of different ages and beliefs, Sobh's work is not only an illumination of an important historical period at a new scale. It is also a unique meditation on the nature of storytelling. In The Keeper of Stories, stories struggle to survive the erasures of war and to rescue the sweetness of living, and connect the tellers and their audience in sometimes welcome, sometimes maddening ways. The transformation of pain and love into art is both the subject and substance of this necessary new book, sensitively brought into English by a translator who shares aspects of Sobh's background and worked with the author on the translation.