These deaths are presented as artifacts of Aleppo, with its public hanging space, desecrated statues, and bombed out apartments and city squares. The story revolves around death, which comes in all forms: the deaths of parents and children, the death of culture, and the death of Syrian city landscapes. Set in the coffee shops, apartments, and street corners of Aleppo and Raqqa, the capital of ISIS, the novel follows Jumaa, an unemployed Arabic teacher who struggles to live peacefully in a dangerous city. Rohan’s plain prose helps to feature the emotional earthquakes these characters undergo while they’re navigating ordinary happenings, and her masterful use of Irish lilts and rhythms helps to reveal intricate emotional distances between those who left and those who stayed behind, even as it nestles the reader deep into her characters’ hearts and minds.ĮLAINE CHIEW (April 27, 2021) Roundabout of DeathĪ heartwrenching and shocking work of historical fiction, Faysal Khartash’s Roundabout of Death focuses on the human cost of Syria’s civil war. Even when burdened by physical conditions, as with a traffic warden in a wheelchair and a priest suffering from dementia, they manage to roam-the former through being nursed by a desirable woman, and the latter by wandering out of his house. Older women in “Collisions” and “Any Wonder Left” feel desire, but not sexiness.īy contrast, the men are less encumbered: a boy gets into scraps because he wants to be Sherlock Holmes a rural teenager lusts after an older, divorced lodger, sees her naked, and has violent fantasies. In other stories, young women grapple with men in sexualized encounters, when what they want is intimacy. A mother finally takes her first flying lesson when her uterus hemorrhages. The hairdresser agonizes over whether her marriage could withstand the abortion she had.

The stories’ women are burdened by their bodies and womanhood. In “In the Event of Contact,” the youngest of three identical triplets cannot bear to be touched, causing the sisters to drift apart. A New York hairdresser discovers how deep her emotional rift is with her parents over the issue of children. A man in San Francisco who’s cheating on his wife bridles at his Irish mother’s visit. In settings including America to Ireland, Rohan’s characters negotiate treacherous emotional distances in poignant ways. Meanwhile, intimacy is a double-edged sword. Here, contact, or the lack thereof, signals loss, emptiness, and need. Book of the Day Roundup: May 17-21, 2021 In the Event of Contactĭistance, psychological and physical, runs through Ethel Rohan’s short story collection In The Event of Contact.

Wait for God to Notice by Sari Fordham