With The Silence and the Roar, Nihad Sirees writes a powerful, life-affirming and Kafkaesque novel about a censored writer trying to live a normal life under a Middle Eastern dictatorship, Syria.
A mysterious tale-within-a-tale of family secrets by the most prominent Syrian author working today. The world is so strange, The strangest things are the stories you overhear. When a hapless bureaucrat finds himself stranded in the countryside during a raging storm, he seeks refuge in a grand yet isolated mansion, inhabited by only an elderly gentleman and his unwelcoming servant. The tale of family secrets he encounters while sheltering there begins with a faded photograph in yellowed newspaper, of a beautiful woman stepping off a train at Aleppo station many years ago. It transports him to Syria's golden age, to the heart of the mysterious, unconventional banat al-ishreh - the infamous women who live, dance and play music together - and into a tangled web of forbidden love
Al-Samt wa-al-Sakhab is the first annotated edition of Syrian writer Nihad Sirees's award-winning novella, created for the Arabic language classroom. This edition is abridged in the original Arabic and includes vocabulary aids, reading questions, and supplementary materials.