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 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 [A] 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 Powerful and compassionate — Lucy Popescu * * The Observer * * The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war * * Guernica * * 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 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 The Foghorn Echoes bristles. It burns bright . . . 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 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 . . . 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 A heartfelt, compelling tale that should be added on bookshelves everywhere — ELIAS JAHSHAN Protest, civil war and refugee politics hum in the novel’s background, but they are not its heartbeat. Instead, Ramadan focuses on love, loss and identity amidst the ruins * * NB Magazine * *