"A book as unique as its subject matter – messy, incomplete, at times unreliable, yet as haunting and alluring as memories themselves."
Justin Stephani - Electric Literature "This elegy for a lost Beirut, past and future, this novel was carrying me to a place I had never been before."
Alan Cheuse - NPR "In this remarkable novella, Jaber merges ... Read morethe cinematic image and affective response to investigate the paradox of memory and imagination, the polarization of the city, and the irretrievably fractured sense of self left behind by the thousands of disappeared civilians during the Lebanese Civil War."
Ploughshares "A slim, powerful volume, now in deft translation by Kareem James Abu-Zeid ... [Jaber] is a major force in Arabic literature."
M. Lynx-Qualey - The Chicago Tribune "Clever and illuminating."
Malcolm Forbes - The National "Jaber shares a delight in stories that defy conventional ideas about identity and the relations between East and West."
The New York Review of Books "Jaber is interested in what it means to live in and with fear, not for one season but for a whole generation, two generations, three. He’s interested in the bones of Beirut, a city that has had to rebuild itself repeatedly after being razed in war in 140 B.C., then devastated by the earthquake of 551, then again during the civil war, a city whose name derives from the Canaanite be’erot — “wells” — the water table that still sustains it. He’s interested in what lies beneath, what nourishes us without our knowing."
Parul Sehgal - The New York Times Book Review "[An] unflinching thriller about trauma and forgiveness, set in the chaos of the Lebanese Civil War."
Jeva Lange - The Week "Abu-Zeid has made Rabee Jaber’s Beirut part of our imaginary landscape and added him to our constellation of fiction writers."
Erik Noonan - World Literature Today Show Less