As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, Zoulfa Katouh
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow is a heartwrenching story about the war in Syria, following a young woman, Salama, forced into being a surgeon by circumstance. She was in her first year of medical school when the war broke out, and among those who fled and those who were killed, she had to step up and help those she could, but she dreams of leaving with her pregnant sister-in-law, of escaping to Europe before the baby is born, as they have little in the way of food and their circumstances become more dangerous as the days goes on. While the novel’s rather simplistic prose gives away its YA status, it does not take away from the overall narrative and its grief-inducing events, or the fact of its necessity – is there another book that exists about the war in Syria? (A real question, please tell me if there is one!) As time progresses, the reader sees Salama’s mental state deteriorate rapidly, making us question what is real and what is not. Katouh’s novel is an indispensable read that exposes the terrors of war in such a vivid manner that it is impossible to read it and be unaffected.
The Private Parts of Women, Lesley Glaister
Glaister’s chilling novel is divided between two women whose lives intersect: Inis, who has left her husband and children after feeling overwhelmed and suffocated in her marriage, and Trixie, an elderly woman living in the house next door, who readers quickly understand suffers from some kind of mental instability as well as a traumatic childhood. Glaister develops both of these characters through flashbacks to their childhoods and adolescences, through which even their most selfish (in Inis’s case, leaving her husband and children, which readers are supposed to perceive as selfish but is never directly called that) or unhinged (in Trixie’s case, being undermined by the voices in her mind such that they control her body, oftentimes in devastating ways) acts are easily seen in a sympathetic light. The novel builds in tension, with readers understanding what will happen chapters before we reach the climax, in which Inis and Trixie reach a point of no return. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, unnerving as it was, and highly recommend it. As with so many of my reads, I discovered it through the Women’s Prize for Fiction, as it was longlisted in 1996.