The Hair of the Pigeon

If you fall in love, love a moon; and if you steal, steal a pigeon. Ghassan grows up a free spirit among the constrained lives of the displaced in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, Syria. His best friends are Badawi, who is all football, fists and fast-money schemes, and Sama, the girl whose eyes mirror the sky. The ghosts of time, life and death remain hidden, but when the Arab Spring ignites a wave of protest and hope across the region, the drums of war begin to thunder, and devastating secrets rise to the surface. Sama is the first to disappear. The government's brutal crackdown against dissent shatters their fragile world. Ghassan vanishes into one of Assad's notorious prisons, where he is tortured mercilessly and barely survives. When he emerges from the underground, he finds Yarmouk camp under siege, his home in ruins, his mother changed, and his father dying. As fighters and civilians starve in a camp sealed off from the world, the truth of the past unravels. Told with aching intimacy and poetic force, The Hair of the Pigeon is an epic tale of exile, survival, and indestructible love, tracing a path from the atrocities of the Syrian civil war, across the Mediterranean, to present-day Copenhagen. "With Morsi's ear for dialogue and eye for the human touch, this work shows the power of the novel to transcend the often-transient nature of the media cycle." Antony Loewenstein "In this luminous second novel, Mohammed Massoud Morsi confirms himself as one of our essential storytellers, artfully weaving beauty and brutality with a rare tenderness - a reminder that even in ruin, humanity endures." Sara M Saleh