- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (5 Jun 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241144094
- ISBN-13: 978-0241144091
- Product Dimensions: 24 x 15.2 x 3.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 205,456 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
About the Author
Robin Yassin-Kassab was born in Britain to a Syrian father and English mother. He graduated from Oxford University and travelled extensively, working as a journalist in Pakistan before moving to Oman where he now teaches English.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic Smorgasbord of a Book,
By
This review is from: The Road from Damascus (Hardcover)
Some people have interesting experiences in their lives, and some people can write interesting prose. I think that both are applicable to this début from Robin Yassin-Kassab.
A beautiful, introspective wife with a great amount of tolerance asserts her identity and newfound religious karma with a headscarf while suffering her husband Sami's journey of discovery via Damascus, the London drug scene, bereavement and a police cell. Questions of identity are at the heart of the book. The modern globalising world and the friction of cultures all feed the book's plot. Islam (and religion in general) are ingredients. Characters from beautifully métisse backgrounds give a backdrop to the narrative, and serve to raise the kind of questions we must all ask ourselves in today's world. Indeed is the central character a British Syrian or a Syrian Brit (does it matter)? A Russian/Hungarian naturalised Brit focuses on the romantic part of his origins... a London raised arab, once into Public Enemy and black underground cuture, is now a "born again" Muslim with a tendency to mix reggae, rap and and street slang before re-asserting his piety with Koranic references. No longer is it simple to just state your identity according to nationality or birthplace. People move around a lot (as does the action in the book) and their allegiances change. You finish this book with a sense that the journey upon which you embark to find the answers is more important than the answers themselves (perhaps there aren't any), that Robin is indeed an erudite and fascinating person, and that questions of tolerance and creed are far better explored by reading these pages than by watching western TV news or asserting your identity as a simple equation of birthplace, nationality, and the colour of your skin.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
London set novel of ideas.,
By
This review is from: The Road from Damascus (Hardcover)
i found Yassin-Kassab's brilliant debut difficult to put down and it deserves wide popularity.
The book has been reviewed in depth already on amazon so i won't regurgitate any plot but I will say that characters are cleverly used to delineate useful fictional boundaries around and between a few of the multifaceted aspects of Islam in London and, without ramming it in the readers face, Yassin-Kassab demonstrates just how ridiculous and cliched a vast swathe of the media's representation of contemporary British Islam is. It's to the authors great credit that even through employing this clever tactic, the characters remain well rounded and sympathetic instead of ham fisted ciphers and like any good novel, you genuinely miss them after closing the last page. It's also extremely refreshing to read a new novel that's brim full of ideas, a novel not afraid to have ideas, sometimes radical ones. At times i was even reminded of Philip K. Dick at his drug twisted gnostic best. I look forward to this talented new authors next novel, i suspect exceptional things are on their way.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fine London-based cross-cultural novel,
By A Common Reader "Committed to reading" (Sussex, England) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (TOP 50 REVIEWER)
This review is from: The Road from Damascus (Hardcover)
The Road to Damascus is first of all, a very well-written novel. The style is accessible but also challenging, the use of language superb, occasionally stopping you in your tracks to take in the use of words and phrases from the best of traditional English through to the street language of various London cultures. Yassin-Kassab blends styles together in a way which mirrors the language of contemporary London in all its colour and vibrancy.
Essentially it is about a the summer of 2001 in the life of British-born (of Syrian parents), Sami Traifi, a struggling academic, who since graduating has been trying to write is doctoral thesis. He has just returned from Syria where he has been discovering his roots. Flash-back chapters trace his history, including his relationship with his beautiful and gracious wife Muntaha. On returning from his year in Damascus, where discovering his family roots has not been as helpful as he had hoped, he finds his wife has taken to wearing a head-scarf as an expression of a renewed faith. Sami, an avowed secularlist, finds this deeply distressing, the more so as he himself is on a course of self-destruction, using drugs and drink to veil his own sense of failure and frustration. He fails to realise that Muntaha's hijab is not an expression of a new fundamentalism so much as a symbol of a quiet spiritual renewal and rediscovery of prayer. Muntaha's brother on the other hand, previously only committed to hip-hop music and drugs, has adopted an unthinking and ignorant fundamentalism, leading to some insightful exchanges between brother and sister on the meaning of Islam. One of the most interesting features of the novel to me, is the use of characters from a variety of strands of contemporary Islam. Muntaha retains her liberal world-view while finding peace in the Koran, while her brother only finds provocation to violence and retribution. The Christian world is very like this, where what to most is a religion of peace and reconciliation, to its fundamentlist wing is religion of judgement and wrath. The powerful apocalyptic strand in the conversations of some characters in the book, echoes the September 11th events at the World Trade Centre, which several of Robin Yassin-Kassab's characters see as pivotal and prophetic. There are so many themes in the book, it would be difficult to mention them all, but I was particularly interested in the debates on the unifying effect of Islam - as opposed to an earlier unsatisfactory Arabism which has failed in various ways. The book is not just about contemporary Islam and its struggle to come to terms with (or oppose) Western values, but is also full of the day to day struggles of humanity when faced with family break-up, the loss of community cohesion and the dramas of unemployment, ill-health, povery and bereavement. The book is dramatic and from time to time humerous, and is in all senses, a "good read" which I found hard to put down. It is moving in many ways, and presents a cast of characters who are quite believable and as with all good books, when you turn the last page you know you are going to miss them and wonder what happened next.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
