Tal al-Malouhi, aged 18, was arrested by the Assad regime in December 2009. She still hasn’t been released.
Robin Yassin-Kassab
I’m heading for the mosque in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides. The most northerly mosque in Scotland.
Published in France in 2006, Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes sold over 700,000 copies and won the Prix Goncourt.
One night after dark when his brothers were already asleep his father, returning home even later than usual, called him out to the yard. Excitement was crackling in his eyes and voice. So Ali stepped out carefully, open-eyed, pointed foot following pointed foot.
Money can be easily lost or can lose its value. Wealth will drain away. Even if you manage to hold it in place, you may well find that the best part of your life has drained away as you worked to make it.
My friend Will has built me a bookroom. It sits at the transition point of our property and the farmer’s. From the large window I see the two-year-old hedge on the boundary, and sheep fields and drumlins, and beyond them the rising Galloway Hills.
Now here’s a strange coincidence. In the summer of 1994, after a year living in Rawalpindi and working for The News – the English-language sister of the Urdu Jang – I spent six weeks travelling in the high mountains of the Pakistani north.
A short story by Robin Yassin-Kassab.
Nothing in the realm of the sensorium is simple. To start with, it seems that an account of a body’s life will be more comprehensible, less ambiguous, than a mental biography.
Late in 2018 we moved to a place in the countryside of Galloway, in south west Scotland. It was only fifteen miles from our previous residence but it was still an entirely different world.