The Arsonists' City
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Narrated by:
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Leila Buck
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By:
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Hala Alyan
About this listen
“The Arsonists’ City delivers all the pleasures of a good old-fashioned saga, but in Alyan’s hands, one family’s tale becomes the story of a nation - Lebanon and Syria, yes, but also the United States. It’s the kind of book we are lucky to have.” (Rumaan Alam)
A rich family story, a personal look at the legacy of war in the Middle East, and an indelible rendering of how we hold on to the people and places we call home
The Nasr family is spread across the globe - Beirut, Brooklyn, Austin, the California desert. A Syrian mother, a Lebanese father, and three American children: all have lived a life of migration. Still, they’ve always had their ancestral home in Beirut - a constant touchstone - and the complicated, messy family love that binds them. But following his father's recent death, Idris, the family's new patriarch, has decided to sell.
The decision brings the family to Beirut, where everyone unites against Idris in a fight to save the house. They all have secrets - lost loves, bitter jealousies, abandoned passions, deep-set shame - that distance has helped smother. But in a city smoldering with the legacy of war, an ongoing flow of refugees, religious tension, and political protest, those secrets ignite, imperiling the fragile ties that hold this family together.
In a novel teeming with wisdom, warmth, and characters born of remarkable human insight, award-winning author Hala Alyan shows us again that “fiction is often the best filter for the real world around us” (NPR).
©2021 Hala Alyan (P)2021 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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A Palestinian Family in Exile
- By zaina on 08-25-17
By: Hala Alyan
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The Twenty-Ninth Year
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For Hala Alyan, 29 is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past - memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith - winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife.
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So vivid and evoking.
- By @booksandbreath on 01-01-24
By: Hala Alyan
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The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
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Overly ambitious
- By Placeholder on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
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Sparks Like Stars
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Kabul, 1978: The daughter of a prominent family, Sitara Zamani lives a privileged life in Afghanistan’s thriving cosmopolitan capital. The 1970s are a time of remarkable promise under the leadership of people like Sardar Daoud, Afghanistan’s progressive president, and Sitara’s beloved father, his right-hand man. But the ten-year-old Sitara’s world is shattered when communists stage a coup, assassinating the president and Sitara’s entire family. Only she survives.
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Amazing
- By Lisa on 03-26-21
By: Nadia Hashimi
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Recognizing the Stranger
- On Palestine and Narrative
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Isabella Hammad
- Length: 2 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
By: Isabella Hammad
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The Moon That Turns You Back
- Poems
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 1 hr and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.
By: Hala Alyan
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Salt Houses
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Leila Buck
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On the eve of her daughter Alia's wedding, Salma reads the girl's future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
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A Palestinian Family in Exile
- By zaina on 08-25-17
By: Hala Alyan
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The Twenty-Ninth Year
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 1 hr and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For Hala Alyan, 29 is a year of transformation and upheaval, a year in which the past - memories of family members, old friends and past lovers, the heat of another land, another language, a different faith - winds itself around the present. Hala's ever-shifting, subversive verse sifts together and through different forms of forced displacement and the tolls they take on mind and body. Poems leap from war-torn cities in the Middle East, to an Oklahoma Olive Garden, a Brooklyn brownstone; from alcoholism to recovery; from a single woman to a wife.
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So vivid and evoking.
- By @booksandbreath on 01-01-24
By: Hala Alyan
-
The Parisian
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Fiona Button
- Length: 20 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A masterful debut novel by Plimpton Prize winner Isabella Hammad, The Parisian illuminates a pivotal period of Palestinian history through the journey and romances of one young man, from his studies in France during World War I to his return to Palestine at the dawn of its battle for independence.
-
-
Overly ambitious
- By Placeholder on 06-16-19
By: Isabella Hammad
-
Sparks Like Stars
- A Novel
- By: Nadia Hashimi
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Kabul, 1978: The daughter of a prominent family, Sitara Zamani lives a privileged life in Afghanistan’s thriving cosmopolitan capital. The 1970s are a time of remarkable promise under the leadership of people like Sardar Daoud, Afghanistan’s progressive president, and Sitara’s beloved father, his right-hand man. But the ten-year-old Sitara’s world is shattered when communists stage a coup, assassinating the president and Sitara’s entire family. Only she survives.
-
-
Amazing
- By Lisa on 03-26-21
By: Nadia Hashimi
-
Recognizing the Stranger
- On Palestine and Narrative
- By: Isabella Hammad
- Narrated by: Isabella Hammad
- Length: 2 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom.
By: Isabella Hammad
-
The Moon That Turns You Back
- Poems
- By: Hala Alyan
- Narrated by: Hala Alyan
- Length: 1 hr and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A diaspora of memories runs through this poetry collection—a multiplicity of voices, bodies, and houses hold archival material for one another, tracing paths between Brooklyn, Beirut, and Jerusalem. Boundaries and borders blur between space and time and poetic form—small banal moments of daily life live within geopolitical brutalities and, vice versa, the desire for stability lives in familiarity with displacement.
By: Hala Alyan
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Minor Detail
- By: Adania Shibli, Elisabeth Jaquette - translator
- Narrated by: Siiri Scott
- Length: 3 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba - the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people - and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims, they capture a Palestinian teenager, and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder.
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Very powerful
- By Phillip Straghalis on 04-09-21
By: Adania Shibli, and others
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Against the Loveless World
- A Novel
- By: Susan Abulhawa
- Narrated by: Susan Abulhawa
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been.
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Don’t narrate your own books!
- By Sara on 11-21-20
By: Susan Abulhawa
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The House of Doors
- By: Tan Twan Eng
- Narrated by: David Oakes, Louise-Mai Newberry
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings—and the freedom to travel with Gerald.
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Great, but no “Garden”
- By Susan on 10-30-23
By: Tan Twan Eng
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On Palestine
- By: Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 5 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's 2014 assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine.
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Excellent Introduction/101 Level Book
- By Anonymous User on 10-24-23
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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The Wishing Game
- A Novel
- By: Meg Shaffer
- Narrated by: Rachel L. Jacobs, Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Years ago, a reclusive mega-bestselling children’s author quit writing under mysterious circumstances. Suddenly he resurfaces with a brand-new book and a one-of-a-kind competition, offering a prize that will change the winner’s life in this absorbing and whimsical novel.
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Painful to listen to
- By Dan Viens on 09-08-23
By: Meg Shaffer
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
What listeners say about The Arsonists' City
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nichole
- 05-07-21
All the feels
I loved this book. Having lived in Beirut, it felt true to me, like I'd met each of the characters before. It's a beautiful story of love, trauma, grief, family, and identity.
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- Jeannette K. Dalton
- 09-07-24
Family dynamics and internal struggle
Story of family dynamics, and struggles. It took me a while to get into the book and learn all the characters, but totally worth it. Also explores themes of “what is home?” - “what does it mean to return home?” - “What does it mean to be in exile? An immigrant?”
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- Kindle Customer
- 05-07-22
amazing
The performance is actually a 10/5 its insane how talented the voice actor is. This was my favorite book of 2021 out of the 50/60 books I read.
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1 person found this helpful
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- N. Diab
- 02-11-22
Fun listen but unnecessarily too long
Very entertaining read. Goes by fast, but too long. The story is relatively common. The author put every social issue in one book, she could’ve concentrate on one or too issues instead every issue. Camps, war, Syrian-Lebanese conflict, lesbianism, immigration, discrimination ( brown skin)etc…
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- Emile Kfouri
- 01-26-22
The most Exquisite book I have ever listened to
You must listen to this book - it is perfect in every way. As a Lebanese American fluent in both languages and cultures I can not think of a more authentic story. Capturing our story. Lebanon, the war, America our adopted country, all recounted with such love and respect. Leila's reading of the book is a master class in how to bring a book to life. Her account: perfect! Her tone and cadence: perfect. There were times she brought me to tears because I could hear my relatives talking, I could smell the city, I could feel the pain and joy of being a Lebanese American and all that means. Thank you so much to Hala and Leila. Chukran!
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- Taryn Hoppes
- 04-25-24
I cried... I laughed... I felt... I learned.
This a deep rooted story of love, strength, and perspective. Read it. I want more.
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-25-21
Couldn’t finish it
I really wanted to like this book, but the descriptions about every little situation with each character felt never ending. I listened for hours and nothing had really happened, I didn’t get to the Beirut part. If you like a lot of description and stories with multiple characters and family dynamics you’ll enjoy it. The start was captivating and quick paced and beautifully written, but sadly my interest kept fading as the stories in the present moment kept dragging.
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