The Arsonists' City

by Hala Alyan Narrated by Leila Buck

Overview

A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home
The Nasr family is spread across the globe-Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they've always had their ancestral home in Beirut-a constant touchstone-and the complicated, messy family love that binds them.
But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.
The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets-lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame-that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political
protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.
In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, the award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

★ 01/18/2021

Poet and novelist Alyan (Salt Houses) illuminates in this exquisite novel the recent history of Lebanon and Syria through the intimate tragedies and betrayals befalling one family. After Lebanese American heart surgeon Idris Nasr’s father dies, Idris feels compelled to sell the family’s ancestral home in Beirut. His Syrian-born wife, Mazna and their three adult children—Ava, Mimi, and Naj—fear he’s making a mistake, and they gather in Beirut to host a memorial and discuss the sale. All of the children harbor jealousies of various kinds and hide secrets from one another and from their parents, but no secrets are bigger or more potentially devastating than those carried by Mazna, and they gradually emerge in flashbacks of her life before she married Idris. The family conflict plays out over the summer of 2019, and the narrative alternates with scenes from Mazna and Idris’s lives in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War and in California during the early years of their marriage. “We don’t choose what we belong to,” Mazna considers near the novel’s end, and in Alyan’s sweeping yet intimate narrative, this thought holds true for the characters’ relationships to family and country alike. Tenderly and compassionately told, and populated with complicated and flawed characters, the Nasrs’ story interrogates nostalgia, memory, and the morality of keeping secrets against the backdrop of a landscape and a people in constant flux. Alyan’s debut was striking, and this one’s even better. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

Breathless...Alyan plants the riches of the city with stealthy precision, making the maddening conundrum of Beirut yours...From Lebanon, we visit Syria. We reach back to Palestine. The three nations mirror the imperfect, strained yet inextricable relationship of the Nasr children, now adults...Alyan distilled the fog of displacement and exposes the ways an unfamiliar culture can devour the traits that make us special. And when plumbing the intricacies of race and womanhood, Alyan turns paragraphs into poetry.”  — New York Times Book Review

 "Feels revolutionary in its freshness...The book has all the elements we expect from a family saga, but set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s long, sad history, the narrative stakes are so much higher." — Entertainment Weekly

"Beautifully illustrating the complexities, fragilities and flaws of families, this heartfelt novel centers siblings struggling to make a decision about the sale of the family home in Beirut as secrets, bonds and the legacies of war come to the fore."   — Ms. magazine

“I didn’t think I could love The Arsonists’ City as much as Salt Houses, but I did. It was sharp, thought-provoking. I couldn’t put it down. Hala Alyan is a lyrical force, a much-needed Arab American voice.”  — Etaf Rum, New York Times best-selling author of A Woman Is No Man  

“I don’t exactly understand how Hala Alyan does it—conjures love, sorrow, betrayal, and joy; goes from being funny and warm to incisive and thoughtful—but as a reader, I’m glad that she does. The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.”  — Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind  

"Alyan’s novel brims with life as the Nasr family’s secrets are revealed, pushing past into present. Spanning across the globe, from Palestine to Lebanon and from Syria to America, each character is housed in pockets of social and identity politics, exile, civil war, and everything in between...They must relive their lives, where love rushes to the fore as quickly as heartbreak." — Arab News  

"A profound inquiry into what it means to be a family, determine your identity, and hold onto a home — particularly in a world that doesn't always weigh equally the importance of everyone's home, identity, and family...Alyan is virtuosic at portraying the complicated bonds that exist between family members, and she is unafraid to show both the beauty and the despair that come with true intimacy, love, and loss."  — Refinery 29

"Simultaneously a sprawling look across five decades at the legacy of unending violence in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Syria, and an intimate, heartfelt portrait of a family gathering at their ancestral home in Beirut."  — The OC Register  

"Alyan’s varied talents never cease to amaze."  — The Millions

"Alyan, author of the award-winning Salt Houses, has written another family saga studded with the same beautiful lyricism...Makes for great fiction." — Lit Hub  

"A sweeping family saga that examines the insidious long shadow of war...Alyan brings her talents to examine the ongoing crisis of Palestinian displacement in The Arsonist’s City through deeply imagined characters, place-based descriptions that teem with life, and attention to conflicts from past to present day."  — Jacqueline Alnes, Electric Literature  

"Alyan, who is a family therapist as well as a poet and novelist, has a gift for depicting the knotty, messy but ultimately resilient bonds of family love. Though The Arsonists’ City lays bare how civil war and brutal violence impact a single family, it is the everyday, sometimes petty squabbles between husband and wife, brother and sister, parent and child that make this novel both memorable and relatable."  — BookPage 

"This multi-generational story is deeply thought-provoking."  — HelloGiggles 

“No one knows the human heart like Hala Alyan. Her ability to show its unexpected contours is on full display in The Arsonists' City—a book so gorgeously written I found myself reading sentences aloud just to keep them with me a little longer."  — Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk and The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

Etaf Rum

I didn’t think I could love The Arsonists’ City as much as Salt Houses, but I did. It was sharp, thought-provoking. I couldn’t put it down. Hala Alyan is a lyrical force, a much-needed Arab American voice.” 

Ms. magazine

"Beautifully illustrating the complexities, fragilities and flaws of families, this heartfelt novel centers siblings struggling to make a decision about the sale of the family home in Beirut as secrets, bonds and the legacies of war come to the fore."  

Lit Hub  

"Alyan, author of the award-winning Salt Houses, has written another family saga studded with the same beautiful lyricism...Makes for great fiction."

Entertainment Weekly

"Feels revolutionary in its freshness...The book has all the elements we expect from a family saga, but set against the backdrop of Lebanon’s long, sad history, the narrative stakes are so much higher."

Arab News  

"Alyan’s novel brims with life as the Nasr family’s secrets are revealed, pushing past into present. Spanning across the globe, from Palestine to Lebanon and from Syria to America, each character is housed in pockets of social and identity politics, exile, civil war, and everything in between...They must relive their lives, where love rushes to the fore as quickly as heartbreak."

Refinery 29

"A profound inquiry into what it means to be a family, determine your identity, and hold onto a home — particularly in a world that doesn't always weigh equally the importance of everyone's home, identity, and family...Alyan is virtuosic at portraying the complicated bonds that exist between family members, and she is unafraid to show both the beauty and the despair that come with true intimacy, love, and loss." 

The Millions

"Alyan’s varied talents never cease to amaze." 

The OC Register  

"Simultaneously a sprawling look across five decades at the legacy of unending violence in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon and Syria, and an intimate, heartfelt portrait of a family gathering at their ancestral home in Beirut." 

New York Times Book Review

Breathless...Alyan plants the riches of the city with stealthy precision, making the maddening conundrum of Beirut yours...From Lebanon, we visit Syria. We reach back to Palestine. The three nations mirror the imperfect, strained yet inextricable relationship of the Nasr children, now adults...Alyan distilled the fog of displacement and exposes the ways an unfamiliar culture can devour the traits that make us special. And when plumbing the intricacies of race and womanhood, Alyan turns paragraphs into poetry.” 

Rumaan Alam

I don’t exactly understand how Hala Alyan does it—conjures love, sorrow, betrayal, and joy; goes from being funny and warm to incisive and thoughtful—but as a reader, I’m glad that she does. The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation—Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.” 

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2021-02-10
Alyan’s riveting novel, set in America and the Middle East, brims with overlapping memories of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties within a seemingly assimilated Syrian Lebanese American family.

In 1978, young Palestinian Zakaria is assassinated in a refugee camp in Beirut, the victim of a factional revenge killing during Lebanon’s civil war. Weeks before, Zakaria had betrayed his best friend, Lebanese Idris, with Idris’ Syrian girlfriend, Mazna. Spelled out in the first pages, these facts will haunt the novel as their impact on members of the Nasr family comes to light. Cut to present-day California, where cardiac surgeon Idris Nasr lives with Mazna, whom he married not long after Zakaria’s death. Their three grown children, born and raised in America, take their parents’ perpetually rocky 40-year marriage for granted. And as they first avoid, then succumb to Mazna’s entreaties to convene in Beirut—supposedly to hold a memorial service for Idris’ recently deceased father but really to protest against Idris’ selling the ancestral home he's just inherited—all three are hiding problems from their parents. In Brooklyn, almost 40-year-old microbiologist Ava suspects her WASP husband is having an affair; in Austin, Mimi, 32, has cheated on his long-suffering girlfriend and been dumped by the band he started; almost 30-year-old Naj, an internationally famous singer/musician, has yet to tell her parents she’s gay. Meanwhile, Mazna, whose passions for Zakaria and her aborted career as an actress have never died, has spent her marriage betraying and being betrayed by Idris, depending upon yet resenting him. And Idris, a man of privileged self-importance and some charm, is perhaps more self-aware than his family realizes. Palestinian American psychologist and writer Alyan is masterful at clarifying the complicated sociopolitical realities surrounding Lebanon's and Syria’s intertwined histories in terms of class, caste, colonialism, and tribalism. But even more masterful here—as in Salt Houses (2017), which portrayed the Palestinian diaspora through four generations of a single family—is her laserlike focus on her multifaceted characters in big and small moments that come together to create a singular family.

Painful and joyous, sad and funny—impossible to put down.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176145977
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The Wrong Ghosts


Tonight the man will die. In some ways, the city already seems resigned to it, the Beirut dusk uncharacteristically flat, cloudy, a peculiar staleness rippling through the trees like wind. It’s easy to costume the earth for grief, and tonight the birds perched upon the tangled electricity wires look like mourners in their black and white feathers, staring down at the concrete refugee camps without song.
 
There are orange trees in the courtyard, planted by the children the previous year; the NGO workers had wanted something bright and encouraged the youngest children to tie cheap ribbons to the branches, but they’d forgotten about the muddy season, and now the ribbons flap limply, streaked in dirt.
 
The man himself—Zakaria—knows it, or doesn’t. He notices the queer feeling of the camps, the way his mother’s makloubeh tastes perfectly fine but seems to be saltless, the meat stringier than usual. His sisters are gathered in the living room, cross-legged on the carpet, his mother’s mother’s carpet, the one that earned them a cuff on the ear back when they were children if they dropped crumbs or spilled Coke on it. You think my mama, Allah rest her soul, Allah take her and Allah keep her, hauled this on her back, her back, all the way from Jerusalem to Ramallah to Amman to this godforsaken armpit of the world so that her heathen grandchildren could spill soda on it? His mother hates the camps, hates Beirut, all of Lebanon, hates their neighbors, the aunties with their tattling and boring lives, always reminding her children, We used to have gardens in Palestine, trees that belonged to us.
 
His sisters are watching an Egyptian soap opera, one of their favorites, the one where the ingénue is kept from her love interest by his wicked mother. The screen is cracked from where one of his sisters—they always disagree about which one—threw a curling iron at it years ago, and it slices the starlet’s torso in two as she cries on a park bench.
 
“What’s wrong with you today?” Zakaria’s mother asks him.
 
“Nothing,” he lies. “I’m just not hungry.” The truth is he’s distracted. Something is nagging at him as it does when he forgets a song, the wispiest tune tugging at him. He thinks of the house across the city, the one where his mother has worked as a housekeeper for twenty years, the one he spent countless afternoons playing in as a boy with the son of the owner, the courtyard they’d transform into a battlefield, an ocean of sharks, lava. Idris was his first friend, his closest friend.
 
Whenever Zakaria thinks of the house, he sees it at dawn, the hour his mother would arrive for her daily duties after taking two buses from the south and walking from the final bus stop through the West Beirut streets, ignoring the vendors selling cigarettes and that sweet candy that made his teethe ache, to reach the gate, always latched, always easily unlocked.
 
He loved playing with Idris, of course, but he also loved those first couple of hours when the house was still quiet with the sleeping family, when his mother would fill buckets with warm soapy water to toss across the veranda, take down clothes she’d hung to dry in the garden the day before, whispering to him, “Silent as a mouse.” When he was alone in the courtyard, it became his; he was the ruler of this inexplicable, beautiful place, a house with four bedrooms, bathtub faucets the shape of swans’ necks.
 
Tonight he feels the house beckoning him with an invisible hand, feels greedy for those rooms, the silk-soft sheets that he’d slept in many times. But his best friend isn’t speaking to him, their recent fight still raw as a burn, the insults they’d hurled at each other still echoing, each saying and not-saying the truth.
 
“You know what you did,” Idris had finally said. “I trusted you. I’ve always trusted you.”
 
Zakaria had fallen silent at that. He felt guilty and yet also unrepentant—how to apologize for the only truly good thing that’d ever happened to him?—which Idris had sniffed out like a dog. He’d called him a traitor.
 
“Not even a little plate?” his mother asks now, interrupting his thoughts.
 
“I’m just not hungry,” Zakaria repeats. To stave off further questions, he tries to appear absorbed in the soap opera that his sisters, sprawled on the large sofa, are watching. The three girls are younger than him, all unmarried, with large noses and dark curly hair. They are branches of the same tree, rooted and yet always apart from him.
 
He must fall asleep at some point.

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