Description: A heart-wrenching story about love, loss, sex, 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, friendship between women, and the universal struggle to come to terms with mortality.Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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"