In her new novel, "Hanna Diab's Room," Shahla Al-Ujaili revives Aleppo's cultural heritage, its architecture, and its timeless stories etched in collective memory, marking a distinctive milestone in her creative journey. In this novel, she engages all forms of historical, political, and documentary narrative to tell the story of the Syrian homeland throughout the ages.

The novel's heroine is a multi-talented female, a professor at the University of Aleppo, the daughter of a communist intellectual whose blood was shed between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Baathists, leaving the mystery of his murder, a painful secret that left her trapped in eternal torment. She tried to overcome it with knowledge, then to work on reviving his project, which he had written down in his diaries before his death, about Hanna Diab and his room where he used to tell stories. The heroine does this by referring to the historians and writers of "The Arabian Nights" who wrote stories about the women and men of Aleppo, namely: Futouh Al-Arifin, Maysar, Helen, Hassan, Yuhanna Al-Suryani, and others. The contents of these stories scattered throughout the novel's pages reflect the specificity of the place and the prevailing social relations during an era dating back more than one hundred and fifty years. After a long journey of research, effort, obstacles, and disappointments, even from those closest to her, she was able to become the sole owner of a great history that had not been included in a book. And the time had come to bring it to the world, not from Ali Baba's cave, nor from One Thousand and One Nights, as she says, but from her heart, filled with love and pain.

In the novel, the characters are not only connected to the past, but also to the present. Thus, the investigation into the history of ancient Aleppo, the recovery of its memory, the quest to reveal the secrets of its places, and the establishment of a dialogue with its characters, turns into a narrative that utilizes all the expressive possibilities of ancient Arabic narrative heritage, on the one hand; and an opportunity to reflect on the historical paths experienced by Syrians, in the past, "the good old days," and the present, "the time of the revolution," on the other hand. The time has come to narrate and interrogate them, and even question them boldly, through which the novel re-raises questions about the significance of what happened, and what is still happening, even at the time of writing the novel.