HighBridge Audio

Skip to Main Content »

Category Navigation:

Search Site
 

Death is Hard Work

Audiobook
Fiction: Literary, War
Unabridged   6.5 hour(s)
Publication date: 02/12/2019

2019 National Book Award Finalist

Death is Hard Work

A Novel

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781684418633
Digital Download ISBN:9781684418640

Summary

Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.

Be the first to review this product
Email to a Friend


Product Description

Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria's ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination.

Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There's only one problem: Their country is a war zone.

With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings' decision to set aside their differences and honor their father's request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.

Reviews/Praise

"Shah's no-nonsense presentation of this short novel moves the action and its many digressions into the past lives of the dead man and his children. The story leaves listeners with an appreciation of the horrors of the Syrian war.” —AudioFile

“Nicely read by Neil Shah, who keeps Bolbol's narrative moving along.” —Library Journal

"Khalifa’s novel compellingly tackles the strain of responsibility felt by a man in war-torn Syria . . . serves as a reminder of the devastation of war and the power of integrity." ―Publishers Weekly

"Insistent, memorable portrait of the small indignities and large horrors of the civil war in Syria . . . Suggestive at times of a modern Decameron and a skillfully constructed epic that packs a tremendous amount of hard-won knowledge into its pages." ―Kirkus Starred Review

Author Bio

Khaled Khalifa has written numerous screenplays and is the author of several novels, including In Praise of Hatred, which was short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and No Knives in the Kitchens of This City, which won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013.