A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution - Brossura

'An essential eyewitness account, and with luck an inaugural document in a Syrian literature that is uncensored and unchained.' (2012-04-15)

'She has the novelist's eye for telling detail... Hers is the urgent task of showing the world what is happening. Thanks to her, we can read about the appalling things that go on in secret, underground places.' (Francis Beckett 2012-06-22)

'Well before the Syrian uprising, Samar Yazbek was challenging the existing taboos of Syrian society in her novels. Since the early days of the revolution, she was involved in the pro-revolutionary movements on the ground, despite the daily threats she was submitted to. On four occasions, Yazbek was taken to detention centres in order to “improve her writing” as one regime officer once put it. A Woman in the Crossfire is her diary of the first four months of the revolution, in which she mixes first-person chronicles of her everyday life and exclusive testimonies of various eye-witnesses (doctors, officers, activists). Some of her chronicles were initially published in the Arab press as early as during spring 2011; hence Yazbek was one of the first voices to describe the reality of the Syrian uprising from the inside.' (Isabelle Mayault 2012-07-02)

“A Woman in the Crossfire” is elevated beyond politics or reportage by Yazbek’s intimate style and her willingness to reveal and involve herself in the book... The book is not about any particular party or movement, but about freely telling Syria’s stories. It is a stand against all the forces silencing and misrepresenting Syrians... Many people, including Yazbek, risked their lives to bring us this book. “A Woman in the Crossfire” is thus an act of fierce resistance against the forces of silencing and simplification. It is anything but an effortless read, but it does wedge open a space wherein, for a moment, it feels possible to genuinely listen. (Marcia Lynx Qualey 2012-07-09)

'Yazbek writes that "intellectuals live in a frozen environment, the world has passed them by. And the mobilisation that has taken place in Syria, what spurred people into the street, was not the writers or the poets or the intellectuals." But they can still bear witness, and Samar Yazbek’s document does that with courage, lyricism and mordant wit.' (Max Dunbar The Siege Diaries: Samar Yazbek’s Syria 2012-07-18)

'This is a handbook for nonviolent activists.' (Mary Russell 2012-07-28)

'Thanks to her [Yazbek] skills as a fiction writer, her book is infused with a hauntingly poetic narrative style. Chilling, disturbing, but irresistibly compelling, “A Woman in the Crossfire” paints a picture of how, in four months, a peaceful uprising turned into a bloodbath.' (India Stoughton 2012-08-04)

'[F]our new books confront the [Syrian] revolution head-on... Of the four writers, Samar Yazbek provides the most arresting, novelistic prose... In its uncompromising reportage from a doomed capital, Yazbek’s book recalls the late Iraqi artist Nuha al Radi’s Baghdad Diaries, a searing chronicle of the disintegration of Saddam’s Iraq during the embargo of the Nineties.' (Justin Marozzi 2012-08-09)

'Impassioned and harrowing memoir of the early revolt...' (2012-08-29)

'The heartbreaking diary of... a Syrian who risked her life to document the regime's brutal attacks on peaceful demonstrators.' (2012-09-07)

Born in 1970 in Kable, in the Alaouite region of Syria, Samar Yazbek studied literature before becoming a journalist and a script writer for Syrian and cinema. Her novels include Child of Heaven, Clay, Cinnamon (forthcoming from Haus, 2013), and In Her Mirrors.