Somewhere, Home

by Nada Awar Jarrar (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $5.50

  Like Rachel Seiffert's The Dark Room, Nada Awar Jarrar's book tells the stories of three individuals, which between them trace the impact of war, displacement and exile. The first tells of a woman returning to the mountains of northern Lebanon, to her childhood village and her memories of family and youth before the war; the second, set in Beirut before the war, tells of a privileged childhood and the impact on a young girl of her friendship with a Palestinian refugee; the third of a woman taken by her husband to Australia, leaving her country behind her, never to see her family again. 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.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $3.27

  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.