Overview

A heart-wrenching story about love, loss, sex, the friendship between women, and the universal struggle to come to terms with death. Just before the outbreak of the July 2006 war in Lebanon, a middle-aged woman named Nahla has gone missing. Distraught, besieged, and without any leads, Nahla's dearest friends—Suad, Azizeh, Hoda, Nadine, and the narrator Alawiya—band together to console one another. They reminisce about the better days of their youth, lifetimes of romantic turmoil, the trouble with love, and their inescapable confrontation with death. Unsure whether Nahla has been killed in the fighting, fled the country, or disappeared into the oblivion of Alzheimer's, Alawiya pieces together Nahla's intimate past, simultaneously illuminating the jagged history of modern Lebanon. Through searching discussions with Nahla's closest confidante Suad, tenacious investigation, and an imaginative effort to reconstruct the life of another, Alawiya might just find a way to bring Nahla back. In This Thing Called Love, celebrated Lebanese novelist Alawiya Sobh takes the war between Israel and Hizballah as the backdrop for a heart-wrenching story about love, loss, sex, the friendship between women, and the universal struggle to come to terms with mortality.

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9781803095905

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Reviews

“Love, like smoke from cigarettes, leaves its traces. We can never really get rid of its scents and memories—so often intertwined. In Alawiya Sobh’s sensorial novel This Thing Called Love (translated by Max Weiss for Seagull Books), the Lebanese author writes about these traces and fragments of love, which despite distance, heartbreak, and wars, continue to sustain lives across the exhausting mechanics of time . . . In the last few months, we have collectively witnessed the calamitous effects of genocide on a culture and a people. At its core, Sobh’s novel bears witness: to the quickly receding life of a woman’s memories, her passionate capacity to love, and her unique endurance in the face of loss, but also by extension, to all those unnamed women sacrificed to the violence of wars and patriarchy.” * New Indian Express * “This novel doesn’t just tackle the content of Lebanese women’s lives. Its form—1,001 Nights-esque, interlinked tales—is also womanish. The action doesn’t follow the forward-marching masculine world of politics and business. Even when women protest or pick up weapons, the narrative stays focused on the circularity of relationships. The book also gives respectful attention to village superstitions, soap operas, and other ‘low’ genres associated with women. Maryam is thus like Elena Ferrante’s globally popular Neapolitan novels in that it places women’s friendships at its center.” -- Praise for ""Maryam, Keeper of Stories"" * ArabLit * “Sobh is an author of remarkable skill and range. She elegantly strings together a love for writing and incisive observations of society’s restrictions on women. The stories told inside this novel traverse an equally diverse range of topics from love, female friendship, loss, and survival. Sobh’s language effortlessly delivers and engages the reader in the varied emotions carried by these topics as it billows and patters and spirals just like the country she describes.” -- Praise for Alawiya Sobh * World Literature Today *

Author Information

Alawiya Sobh is a Lebanese writer, journalist, and editor-in-chief of the women’s magazine Al-Hasnaa. She lives in Beirut. Her first novel, Maryam, Keeper of Stories, is also published by Seagull Books. This Thing Called Love was longlisted for the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Max Weiss is associate professor of history and Near Eastern studies, and associated faculty in comparative literature at Princeton University.

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