No One Reached Them

A novel that delves into the narratives of the region, proposing a new and different narrative for the city of Aleppo in the 19th and mid-20th centuries, through intertwined stories of doomed love, certain death through massacres, plague, earthquakes, and cholera, and the concept of identity and belonging and their questions. It is not just a novel about a Christian child survivor of a massacre in Mardin, raised by a Muslim family in Aleppo, but a true human epic about the deluge and human anxiety, about the illusion of surviving this deluge and epidemics, and about the predicament of life itself. Small destinies lead us to a greater destiny for the city of Aleppo, which throughout its long history has witnessed profound social, political, and religious transformations, observed by Khalifa with new techniques in this epic haunted by the duality of love and death. Longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Booker) - 2019/2020