{"title":"Jabbour Douaihy","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"printed-in-beirut-book-jabbour-douaihy-9781623719906","title":"Printed in Beirut","description":"A DAZLING MYSTERY SET IN THE WORLD OF LEBANON'S BOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY--Farid Abou Cha'r arrives in Beirut on a hot summer morning with his manuscript, looking for a publisher. He is turned down by all of them--nobody reads anymore, he is told. Instead, he accepts a job as a proofreader at the famous old print house Karam Bros., allegedly established in 1908. Disappointed by the menial tasks of checking catalogs and ad copy, Farid secretly hopes that his book will eventually be published. His manuscript never leaves his side until one day it disappears and then reemerges, beautifully printed. Farid soon realizes that the expensive paper it's printed on is the same that the company is using to manufacture fake twenty-euro bills, and that the person who printed the book is none other than his boss's wife. Entangled in a police investigation and an illicit flirtation, Farid discovers that the Karam Bros. print house is not what it seems. Douaihy dizzies the reader with an intricate play of appearances and deception, and as always, portrays Lebanese society with exquisite irony.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49617094476049,"sku":"GOR013503360","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50558861312273,"sku":"CIN1623719909G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1623719909.jpg?v=1750762995"},{"product_id":"king-of-india-book-jabbour-douaihy-9781623719074","title":"The King of India","description":"In mysterious circumstances, the body of Zakaria Mubarak is found at the boundary of his village, Tel Safra in Lebanon. He had just returned from a long exile in Europe, the USA, and Africa, carrying with him a painting by Marc Chagall, the 'Blue Violinist,' a gift from his girlfriend in Paris. Suspicion falls on the cousins who may have killed him to get a treasure supposedly buried underneath the house built by their grandmother when she came back from America. This absorbing novel tells the story of Zakaria's murder, intersected with fables of gold, sibling strife, the love of French women, the fake promise of revolution, and sectarian enmities which have been flaring up from time to time in Lebanon for the last 150 years.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741952418065,"sku":"NGR9781623719074","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50558853316881,"sku":"CIN1623719070VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51663005352209,"sku":"GOR014356086","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53440017957137,"sku":"CIN1623719070G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1623719070.jpg?v=1751449764"},{"product_id":"firefly-book-jabbour-douaihy-9780857429810","title":"Firefly","description":"A powerful novel of a young man living between Muslim and Christian worlds amid the Lebanese Civil War.    Firefly paints a searing portrait of the city of Beirut at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in the early 1970s, as seen through the eyes of its simple, yet perplexing, protagonist, Nizam al-Alami. On Nizam's national ID card, no religion is listed. Muslim by birth, he is Christian by baptism. As a young boy, he found his way into an orchard while playing, and its owners, Touma and Rakheema, instantly fell for him and agreed to raise him as their own, as a Christian, without much resistance from his Muslim parents.     When he is grown, Nizam makes his way to Beirut to study law. Unable to bear the confines of the classroom, he abandons college to explore the city as he pleases. His apartment soon becomes a meeting place for his communist comrades, and he falls in love with Janan, the tormented artist whose dark paintings prophesy the city's bloody future. When Beirut explodes, and the city is divided into a Christian East and a Muslim West, Nizam's apartment turns into a hideout for armed militiamen, and Burj Square is emptied of everything except the Martyrs' Statue that bears witness to the city's most difficult moments. Nizam, too, bears witness, as he sees the corpses of the civil war's victims pile up.     Jabbour Douaihy takes us through Nizam's adventures and struggles as he faces stigmatization, homelessness, and violence in a society that considers him an outsider. Like the light-producing, charismatic fireflies that captured his imagination and eluded him as a child, Nizam is the glimmer of hope epitomized by those who reject binary identities in favor of the in-between. But how long, Douaihy asks, can this glimmer of hope truly last?","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742143160593,"sku":"NGR9780857429810","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50094944289041,"sku":"CIN0857429817G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009058472209,"sku":"NIN9780857429810","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51898672578833,"sku":"GOR014453687","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857429817.jpg?v=1750786874"},{"product_id":"poison-in-the-air-book-jabbour-douaihy-9781623717544","title":"Poison in the Air","description":"Poison in the Air, Jabbour Douaihy's final novel, chronicles the decades of social, political, and economic turmoil leading up to and including the recent collapse of his beloved Lebanon after the horrific explosion that occurred at the Port of Beirut in 2020. Douaihy brings a multitude of bottled-up toxicity to the surface, as though he is writing his last letter to the world, or a suicide note for Lebanon, as he paints a picture of a society marching down a path to self-destruction. A first-person narration by an unnamed male protagonist, his generation's journey - like his country's history - seems to echo that of the phoenix. While that mythical creature is continually reborn from its own ashes, ever resilient, we now see it once again plummeting back into the fire, but as if nearly defeated, 'filled with the poison of disappointments.' (Elias Khoury, L'Orient Litteraire, 2021) As imagined by Douaihy, being cut off from others and absorbed in self-interest brings out humanity's most lethal, destructive nature. Poison in the Air might serve as a warning to us all about the dangers of isolation and polarization, about what happens when we 'sentence ourselves' to listening only to our own voices. The novel's bleak portrayal reflects how essential it is to break out of self-contained bubbles and, like the butterfly he depicts striving toward the light, reunite with the outside world and re-embrace others, in body and in spirit.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49752982159633,"sku":"NGR9781623717544","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50558853841169,"sku":"CIN162371754XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51040819347729,"sku":"NIN9781623717544","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/162371754X.jpg?v=1751088814"},{"product_id":"june-rain-book-jabbour-douaihy-9781623719289","title":"June Rain","description":"One of Lebanon's leading writers recreates a village forever transformed by the massacre of one Christian community by another, and its impact on a mother and her long-estranged son. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e On June 16, 1957, a shoot-out in a village church in northern Lebanon leaves two dozen people dead. In the aftermath of the massacre, the town is divided in two: the Al-Ramis in the north and their rivals, the Al-Semaanis, in the south. But lives once so closely intertwined cannot easily be divided. Neighbors turn into enemies, and husbands and wives are forced to choose between loyalty to each other and loyalty to their clan. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Drawing on an actual killing that took place in his home town, Douaihy reconstructs that June day from the viewpoints of people who witnessed the killings or whose lives were forever altered by them. A young girl overhears her father lending his gun to his cousins but refusing to accompany them to the church. A school boy walks past the dead bodies, laid out in the town square on beds brought out from the houses. A baker, whose shop is trapped on the wrong side of the line, hopes the women who buy his bread will protect him. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e At the center of Douaihy's masterful novel is Eliyya, who, twenty years after immigrating to the US, returns to the village to learn about the father who was shot through the heart in the massacre: the father he never knew. But can the village, alive with the ghosts of his childhood, really provide Eliyya answers to questions he can't even articulate? \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e With an incredible eye for detail, Douaihy describes that fateful Sunday when rain poured from the sky and the traditions and affections of village life were consumed by violence and revenge.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50050635890961,"sku":"GOR013846139","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52934727434513,"sku":"CIN1623719283VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1623719283.jpg?v=1750762994"},{"product_id":"american-quarter-book-jabbour-douaihy-9781566560306","title":"The American Quarter","description":"A love letter to a city of his childhood, Jabbour Douaihy's The American Quarter is set in a small neighborhood in Tripoli, the ancient port on the northern coast of Lebanon. Unfolding at the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it revolves around the radicalization of an ordinary youth named Ismail. But Ismail's story is part of a larger portrait of those nearest to him: the young disabled brother he looks out for; his father Bilal, a massacre survivor; Intisar, his spirited, indulgent mother, a maid like her mother before her in the wealthy, powerful Azzam household; Abdelkarim, the Azzam family's only son, addicted to poetry and opera, and pining for his lost Polish ballerina?all sharply depicted by Douaihy with irony and affection. As well, Ismail's fate is entwined with the disappointments and meager prospects of those around him in the deteriorating American Quarter, and others forced to crisscross the surrounding conflict-scarred lands. Somehow Ismail's reckoning with his assigned mission comes to reflect our own struggles--for redemption, for faith in life in the face of destructive forces that can erase in an instant what is dear to us. A classic tale for our time, in a lucid translation by Paula Haydar, The American Quarter is a compassionate work of great beauty. Paying homage to the persistent presence of a beloved old city and her people, it bolsters us with a gifted writer's long view of the threats to trust and tolerance we now face.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50856757100817,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50856758051089,"sku":"GOR014096112","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53481702162705,"sku":"CIN1566560306G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1566560306.jpg?v=1750991419"},{"product_id":"june-rain-book-jabbour-douaihy-9789992142783","title":"June Rain","description":"One of Lebanon's leading writers recreates a village forever transformed by the massacre of one Christian community by another, and its impact on a mother and her long-estranged son. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e On June 16, 1957, a shoot-out in a village church in northern Lebanon leaves two dozen people dead. 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