An audio book set in Aleppo, Syria, 2012.
1st (Jomaa, once a teacher) and 3rd person. Intellectuals and coffee bars, whores, soldiers, black-marketeers, children from raided villages.
Snipers from minarets, carbombs, fighter planes, suicide bombers, Russian rifles.
Streets which change allegiance overnight. Trouble visiting his mother. Bribes.
His son is arrested, abused, released. Jomaa goes to Raka, hoping to rent a house there, to get away. It's changed since he last visited. ISIS have taken over. A man come on his bus, asks each woman who her guardian is (one of them is being accompanied by her 12 year old daughter), cuts fingernails of the passengers if they're too long, threatens the bus driver who should have checked. 3 heads hang from the clock-tower. He meets Baha by chance, a friend he first met in Paris, who once dreamt of a film career. They have a meal. Next morning he's disappeared on a Jihad mission - he's been trained. Jomaa decides to go back home.
He feels lumps on his head - something to do with sex. Strange. The translator tries to explain them in their notes. I'm not convinced.
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