Loving a Broken Country

Karim is six years old when the war begins. He doesn't understand the politics, the militias, or the shifting lines of a fractured country. He only knows that the radio changes, the sirens sound different, and his parents' faces carry a weight they never had before. From a nine-story building in Beirut, Karim experiences the Lebanese Civil War through the things a child can touch and remember: the smell of bleach in the shelter, the sound of neighbors arguing over which station to trust, the strange rules of a city cut by checkpoints, and the small humiliations of school in a country coming apart. But this is not only a war story. As Karim grows, the novel follows Lebanon itself through decades of fragile peace, political deals, foreign occupation, economic collapse, and the search for something that always feels just out of reach - a country that works. Through radios and pagers, churches and protests, family meals and funerals, Loving a Broken Country shows how ordinary people carry history in their bodies and their habits. It shows how survival is not always heroic. Sometimes it is simply continuing - cooking, praying, arguing, loving, and refusing to leave. From the opening sirens of 1975 to the fires and pagers of a new century, Karim's story is the story of Lebanon itself: broken, stubborn, disappointed, and still searching for hope.