This Thing Called Love

“Love, like smoke from cigarettes, leaves its traces. We can never really get rid of its scents and memories—so often intertwined. In Alawiya Sobh’s sensorial novel This Thing Called Love (translated by Max Weiss for Seagull Books), the Lebanese author writes about these traces and fragments of love, which despite distance, heartbreak, and wars, continue to sustain lives across the exhausting mechanics of time . . . In the last few months, we have collectively witnessed the calamitous effects of genocide on a culture and a people. At its core, Sobh’s novel bears witness: to the quickly receding life of a woman’s memories, her passionate capacity to love, and her unique endurance in the face of loss, but also by extension, to all those unnamed women sacrificed to the violence of wars and patriarchy.” * New Indian Express *
“This novel doesn’t just tackle the content of Lebanese women’s lives. Its form—1,001 Nights-esque, interlinked tales—is also womanish. The action doesn’t follow the forward-marching masculine world of politics and business. Even when women protest or pick up weapons, the narrative stays focused on the circularity of relationships. The book also gives respectful attention to village superstitions, soap operas, and other ‘low’ genres associated with women. Maryam is thus like Elena Ferrante’s globally popular Neapolitan novels in that it places women’s friendships at its center.” -- Praise for "Maryam, Keeper of Stories" * ArabLit *
“Sobh is an author of remarkable skill and range. She elegantly strings together a love for writing and incisive observations of society’s restrictions on women. The stories told inside this novel traverse an equally diverse range of topics from love, female friendship, loss, and survival. Sobh’s language effortlessly delivers and engages the reader in the varied emotions carried by these topics as it billows and patters and spirals just like the country she describes.” -- Praise for Alawiya Sobh * World Literature Today *