This Arab Life is an intimate and honest exploration of a rising Arab generation’s descent into silence. Personal and panoramic, granular and sweeping, the book offers a raw account of the unremitting mire that anticipates the region’s present-day chaos.
In an unusual twist, the author, a daughter of the Levant who claims Jordan and Lebanon as her homes, locates her own privileged class in this painful history and holds a mirror to herself and her fellow travelers. In doing so, she threads a generational tale with grit, color, and nuance.
This Arab Life begins in Amman in the Summer of 1973, and concludes in Beirut in December 2021. But the narrative encompasses a world by turns distant and faded, near and vital.