The Copper Bridge

Nizar Aghri

All faces, paths, and memories lead to one destination: Damascus’s Copper Quarter. The narrator is now in London, but the past has not left his mind. He retreats to it to find solace from the news of the bloody conflict that has afflicted Syria in its long war. The war has dissipated what remained of the dreams of an entire generation of clandestine activists and rebels who were met with prisons, exile, and security pursuits decades ago, when they dared to dream of freedom, or “azadi” in Kurdish. Everything begins when the narrator meets a young woman at an English airport. The flowing narrative, often from the protagonist's perspective, doesn't always distinguish between the young woman’s face and her mother’s, his former beloved Wafaa. The young woman’s face takes him back to her mother’s, and Wafaa brings him back to their years together in the Copper Quarter, in the closed rooms that accommodated love, dreams, and passionate discussions... Nizar Aghri is a Syrian Kurdish novelist and translator residing in Oslo. He studied English literature at Damascus University and has translated from English, French, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Norwegian, and Kurdish into Arabic. "The Copper Bridge" is his second novel from Naufal Publishing House, following the novel "Salem Street" (2017), which was longlisted for the Sheikh Zayed Book Award (2019). “Many Kurdish writers emerged from Salim Barakat’s coat, but their Arabic did not carry the challenge that Barakat’s language did. Nizar Aghri did. He writes in a language that is not his mother tongue, yet he surpassed many Arabic writers with the elegance of his phrases and his captivating excavation into its intricate paths and treasures.” - Iraqi novelist Salah Abd al-Latif