His only clues are an old photo and the bedtime stories his father used to tell him. The Storyteller follows Samir’s search for Brahim, the father whose heart was always yearning for his homeland, Lebanon. In this moving and gripping novel about family secrets, love, and friendship, Pierre Jarawan does for Lebanon what Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan. He pulls away the curtain of grim facts and figures to reveal the intimate story of an exiled family torn apart by civil war and guilt. In this rich and skillful account, Jarawan proves that he too is a masterful storyteller

    As a young officer in the Ottoman Army, he fought the British in World War I and won an Iron Cross. In the 1920s, he mastered the art of insurgency and helped lead a massive uprising against the French authorities in Syria. A decade later, he reappeared in Palestine, where he helped direct the Arab Revolt of 1936. When an effort to overthrow the British rulers of Iraq failed, he moved to Germany, where he spent much of World War II battling his fellow exile, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had accused him of being a British spy. In 1947, Qawuqji made a daring escape from Allied-occupied Berlin, and sought once again to shape his region’s history. In his most famous role, he would command the Arab Liberation Army in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.In this well-crafted, definitive biography, Laila Parsons tells Qawuqji’s dramatic story and sets it in the full context of his turbulent times. Following Israel’s decisive victory, Qawuqji was widely faulted as a poor leader with possibly dubious motives. The Commander shows us that the truth was more complex: although he doubtless made some strategic mistakes, he never gave up fighting for Arab independence and unity, even as those ideals were undermined by powers inside and outside the Arab world. In Qawuqji’s life story we find the origins of today’s turmoil in the Arab Middle East.

    A chance encounter with love presents her with a dilemma which is made even more problematic by an outbreak of violence that forces many to uproot their lives. The world of relative peace and harmony that Maryam once knew is now changed for good, leading her to discover that her only solace lies with two women she meets along the way, Layal and Rose. Each leaves a profound mark on her life, as does working at the local silk factory, something which sparks considerable controversy and leaves her with some unforeseen challenges to confront.

    With this book, Joseph Daher presents a new way of looking at Hezbollah: through the lens of political economy.             By discarding more common approaches to the party that focus on religious discourse or military questions, Daher is freed up to analyze what the party actually is: an organization that is operating within a specific political and socio-economic context, one that simultaneously offers it a rich ground of support and limits its range of action. Daher clearly and carefully positions Hezbollah within that context, focusing on its historic ties with its main sponsor, Iran, its media and cultural wings, its relationship with Western economic policies, and the impact of the Shi’a population on the sectarian politics of Lebanon. Offering additional attention to the party’s positions on worker’s rights and women’s issues, this fresh take on Hezbollah will be incredibly useful for understanding the world’s most tumultuous region.

    In Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads.Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj Hammoud, Nucho conducts extensive interviews and observations in medical clinics, social service centers, shops, banking coops, and municipal offices. She explores how group and individual access to services depends on making claims to membership in the dominant sectarian community, and she examines how sectarianism is not just tied to ethnoreligious identity, but also class, gender, and geography. Life in Bourj Hammoud makes visible a broader pattern in which the relationships that develop while procuring basic needs become a way for people to see themselves as part of the greater public.Illustrating how sectarianism in Lebanon is not simply about religious identity, as is commonly thought, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon offers a new look at how everyday social exchanges define and redefine communities and conflicts.

    The Dream: A Diary of a Film is Malas's haunting chronicle of his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh. It also describes the filmmaking process, from the research stage to the film's unofficial release, in Shatila Camp, before it reached a global audience. In vivid and poetic detail, Malas provides a snapshot of Palestinian refugees at a critical juncture of Lebanon's bloody civil war, and at the height of the PLO's power in Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion and the PLO's subsequent expulsion. Malas probes his subjects' dreams and existential fears with an artist's acute sensitivity, revealing the extent to which the wounds and contingencies of Palestinian statelessness are woven into the tapestry of a fragmented Arab nationalism. Although he halted his work on the film in 1982, following the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, he completed it in 1987, turning 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, but they are preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now in digital code. The Dream is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Palestinians in the modern Middle East, and for students and scholars of Arab filmmaking, politics, and literature.

    Her travelogue, Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon, weaves today’s Lebanon through the time and space of a decade, in a country where “no space is left unpoliticized”. Fernández leaves her meandering route to the fate and goodwill of her drivers, and her journey leads to encounters with fishermen, Hezbollah fighters, grandmothers, United Nations soldiers, Lebanese intelligence officers, and a Syrian bread delivery man. Asking everyone she meets along the way, “Were you here in 2006?”, Fernández bears witness to varying accounts of the previous wars and the current violence in Syria, memories of each war now colored by all the others since.Many of the small border villages Fernández visits are described in the New York Times, often with one-liners like “Hezbollah stronghold”. In Martyrs, the bird’s-eye view of the Guardian and BBC are exchanged for a granular view of Lebanon that belies Western media depictions.Fernández wades into the milieu with observant humor and a soft touch. Martyrs lays one snapshot of southern Lebanon over another, and finds light in between.Belén Fernández is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine and the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She has written extensively for the Al Jazeera English, The London Review of Books blog, Middle East Eye, Telesur English, VICE, and Warscapes. She studied political science at Columbia and the University of Rome La Sapienza.