Somewhere, Home - Hardcover

Jarrar, Nada Awar

3.31

190 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1843952513 ISBN 13: 9781843952510

Publisher: Imprint unknown, 2004

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"Somewhere, Home" tells the stories of three women, each of them far from home who are returning to, or still searching, for somewhere that can be called 'home'. Each of them is Lebanese and drawn back to a beautiful house in a village that represents home, as it was, or as it could be. Maysa returns to the house that was her grandparents when she was a child, in a village high on the slope of Mount Lebanon, leaving Beirut to search for her past and to imagine the past lives of her family. Aida, who has long since left the country of her birth, returns to Lebanon in search of the spirit of the Palestinian refugee who was a second father to her when she was a child. Salwa, now an old woman, taken from her homeland when she was a young wife and mother, recalls her life from her hospital bed, surrounded by her family but still, in some sense, far from home. Between them, these three sections explore women's lives, the experiences of displacement and loss, of exile and return to the homeland, in a prose of exquisite precision and grace.

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Review:

A novel set in modern Lebanon dealing with women's lives in the shadow of war and displacement. The first part tells of a woman who returns to the village of her childhood and her recollections of family life before the war. Part two, which is also before the war, is set in Beirut and is about a privileged childhood and a friendship with a Palestinian refugee. Finally, part three concerns a woman who goes to Australia with her husband and embarks on a totally new life. It is a very moving, quiet novel written with great elegance and much compassion. An excellent fiction debut for a new writer who was born in Australia and now lives in Beirut.

From the Publisher:

A stunningly beautiful and moving novel of the modern Lebanon, of women's lives in the shadow of war and exile, comparable to Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room in its quietly powerful examination of ordinary lives in extraordinary times.

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