The Summer of Saroufim's Widow

Mazen Haidar

"Ain Srara… an imaginary mountain village in Lebanon. To it, Osama journeys to live in her uncle’s house, fleeing the ongoing war in Beirut, where her parents remained. On top of Tal El-Lazzab, in the house of the late Saroufim, his eccentric widow lives, guarding the Shiite cemetery. What secrets does her house hold? What will Osama discover about the cemetery facing it? How will she tame her anxiety about her parents – by reading literature books? By teaching two displaced children? Or by engaging in adventures to decipher treasure puzzles?
The novel sheds light on the theft of antiquities during the war, hinting at an event whose truth was not fully revealed during the Hundred Days' War in 1978. At that time, the press reported the transfer of artifacts from the National Museum of Beirut to the Nicosia Museum in Cyprus under an international treaty for their protection. So, were the artifacts transferred or stolen?
A Lebanese novel that chronicles the daily life of the War of Liberation in 1989 and revives the culture of protecting antiquities with an exciting narrative, featuring young protagonists attempting to decipher symbols carved on tombstones that lead to hidden treasures.

Mazen Haidar – A Lebanese writer and research engineer specializing in architectural heritage (born in Beirut, 1979). He has numerous research papers in Arabic and French on 20th-century residential architecture in Beirut. He has published two novels, "Four Steps Down" (2017) and "Please Replace the Wreaths" (2023), and "The Summer of Saroufim's Widow" is his third novel.

"In his novel, Mazen Haidar, with his refined style, adds beauty and charm to the simplest and most ordinary details of life, presenting the reader with a poignant and profound vision of this world." – Charif Majdalani, Lebanese writer"