![]() ![]() ![]() After committing a hideous crime, he insists on his blamelessness: “I really didn’t have any choices to make … the circumstances we’re put in have their own laws of necessity.” ![]() In his chilling missive, he asks: “So why should I punish myself with thoughts of remorse? … I loved being alive, and I wasn’t the only one who was staying alive through such means.” When his government is toppled, he hides among asylum seekers. The finder is then moved to write their own letter, and thereby make sense of their present isolation.Ī man, tortured for months by the secret police of an unnamed Middle Eastern state, recounts to his mother how he became a torturer himself. The five letters form a chain as each letter falls, by chance, into the hands of another migrant one letter is salvaged from a trash can, another from the seat of an airplane. Translated by Marilyn Booth, the novel is constructed primarily of letters written by five migrants or asylum seekers from the Arab world, all of whom have departed or fled their unnamed countries. Voices of the Lost, awarded the 2019 International prize for Arabic fiction, is the latest novel from the celebrated Lebanese writer Hoda Barakat. ![]()
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