In Praise of Hatred

An unnamed narrator grows up in Aleppo in a house of women, among her lonely aunts, after her grandmother's death. One aunt falls in love with an officer from another sect and is cut off by the family; another marries a fundamentalist and follows him to Saudi Arabia and then Afghanistan. The narrator, a veiled and devout girl, becomes active at university and secretly hands out leaflets, an experience that leads to her arrest and lets hatred grow in her step by step, until it feels as strong as love. Her story unfolds against the armed struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the government at the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s, told from a woman's point of view, and reaches from Aleppo to Riyadh, Aden, London and Afghanistan.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Genres

Politics, Family, Coming of age (assigned by AI)

Set in

Syria, 1970s–1980s

First published

2006 by Dar Amisa

Author's age

42 when first published

ISBN

9780385617635 (Doubleday, United Kingdom)

9780552776134 (Black Swan, United Kingdom)

9781250052346 (Thomas Dunne Books, United States)

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Wikidata