SOMEWHERE, HOME

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.