Description

WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR GAY FICTION

Hussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.

Split between war-torn Damascus and unforgiving Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

Publisher Review

Contemporary, mystical, timeless . . . The Foghorn Echoes gives me a similar feeling to that which I had with The Kite Runner, of characters haunted by love and hunted by loss, across oceans, timelines and warzones. The story is so specific, yet it speaks of all love. When I finished The Foghorn Echoes, I felt that I had read a fiction which was unquestionably, undeniably true -- LEMN SISSAY author of My Name is Why and Gold from the Stone 'Treat your thoughts like hurt children. They haven't learned yet how to handle pain'. So says a wise ghost in Danny Ramadan's sweeping and mesmerising story that spans time and mortal space so expertly and elegantly. This is a beautiful novel, written by a once hurt child and loved and deeply admired by another, me -- ALAN CUMMING The Foghorn Echoes is a deeply moving book about conflict both internal and external, the ways in which cold accidents - of birth, of place, of time - can leave a human being at war with their own desires, their own sense of self. Danny Ramadan is a gifted, sensitive excavator of the things that break people and put them back together, the past as weight and lightness. In this novel he has created a world of immense sensory and emotional precision, at once true in its living details and yet electric with the presence of ghosts -- OMAR EL AKKAD author of What Strange Paradise and American War The Foghorn Echoes bristles. It burns bright. It shouts into the dark with a voice that hovers between a melody and a lamentation. Danny Ramadan writes in these pages with a spellbinding urgency, stripping bare some of the most painful and fundamental truths about displacement and grief, about rage and betrayal. In the process, he reminds us again and again that even the worst of memories contain redemptive powers. This novel is a tender and impassioned love story for a country, for a people, and for all those who refuse to disappear quietly into the land of the forgotten -- MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King, Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize I've read many stories about love and war. Few have moved me this much. The Foghorn Echoes is marvellous: subtle but dramatic, tender but urgent, and beautifully written. I'll be thinking about it for a very long time -- DINA NAYERI author of The Ungrateful Refugee Hussam and Wassim will live on in your heart long after the last page. A story of a country torn apart by war and hearts broken by wars within -- DAMIAN BARR Seldom do we hear stories about members of Syria's queer community told with empathy and nuance, especially in the wake of its civil war. The Foghorn Echoes delivers in spades, but crucially, it's also much more than that and Danny Ramadan's prose is wonderful. This is a heartfelt, compelling tale that should be added on bookshelves everywhere -- ELIAS JAHSHAN, editor of This Arab is Queer Praise for Danny Ramadan: There are moments and scenes of intense clarity and poignancy that will stop readers in their tracks * * Irish Times * * A remarkable read. Danny Ramadan opens a world for his readers and guides them through it with sensitivity and suspense -- BERNHARD SCHLINK, New York Times bestselling author of The Reader Studded with the kind of graceful poetry that makes the most hardened heart soar like a silktail . . . Ramadan has gifted his readers with a resistance manifesto coded with love -- DIRIYE OSMAN