The Book Collectors Audiobook By Delphine Minoui, Lara Vergnaud - translator cover art

The Book Collectors

A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War

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The Book Collectors

By: Delphine Minoui, Lara Vergnaud - translator
Narrated by: Nikki Massoud
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About this listen

"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." (Susan Orlean)

Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war.

Reading is an act of resistance.

Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peaceful resistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place - a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits.

And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had 6,000 volumes; in a month, 15,000. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity.

The library offered a marvelous range of books - from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library’s founders, 23-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read.

The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of words.

©2020 Delphine Minoui (P)2020 Random House Audio
Cultural & Regional Literary History & Criticism Middle East War Thought-Provoking
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I loved the book. It has a great story and I am glad to have learned a small part of what happened in Syria in the past years

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