The Silence and the Roar: A Novel - Softcover

"Sirees takes on, with piercing insight, the huge themes of freedom, individuality, integrity, and, yes, love, in this beautiful, funny, and life-affirming novel...[The Silence and the Roar] indisputably connects to current events, but its value as art and political commentary is timeless. Sirees has written a 1984 for the 21st century."--Publishers Weekly, choice for Top Ten Books of 2013

"In this short, satiric fable, a formerly famous writer silenced by an authoritarian regime finds himself in a predicament where Kafka meets Catch-22."--Kirkus

"With biting humor Nihad Sirees reveals the extraordinary injustices of ordinary life under the oppressive rule of the "Leader." This country remains unnamed but the richly rendered story illuminates the hard reality of the many Middle Eastern states in political transition today."--Shahan Mufti, journalist and author of The Faithful Scribe

"A chillingly prophetic novel. In spare, razor-sharp prose, Sirees describes the effects of authoritative rule on the psyche of an unbreakable and irrepressible artist. Timely, powerful, and searing."--Randa Jarrar, author of Map of Home

"[A] powerful, prescient novel."--Publishers Weekly

"The theatre of the absurd that is everyday life in a totalitarian society is the subject of Nihad Sirees's urgent new novel, a searing political allegory in the tradition of Orwell and Camus. The portrait of a banned writer wandering the streets of a nameless dictatorship that Arab readers will recognize all too well, Sirees's book would be unbearably bleak if it weren't so funny: its narrator's caustic irreverence is his rebellion against the tyrant's roar that would reduce him to silence."--Adam Shatz, Contributing Editor, London Review of Books

"Mixing the absurd with the erotic, Sirees's novel is both political and delicious." --NPR.org

"The wonderful thing about Sirees's small book...is that while it is absolutely and specifically about Syria, Sirees has made it large enough to incorporate your story as well."--Kenyon Review

"A dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship."--Susanna Schanda, Qantara

"Called the Kafka of the Middle East, [Sirees] dismantles with metaphoric touches all the apparatus of a system that compress the individual and his freedom of speech."--France Inter

"[Sirees] lasciviously mocks with a caustic irony the one he names 'the leader.'"--Le Journal du Dimanche

"Sirees' novel can, and should, challenge us to expand our definition of what is personal, and move us to hear the stories of those whose lives are altered by the impact of political strife."--Think Christian

"It should be required reading."--The Guardian

"...it's Sirees's light touch with his subject matter that lends The Silence and the Roar so much of its power."--The Guardian

Fathi, a writer no longer permitted to write, makes his way through a city churned by parades for an unnamed dictator. It is a day stifled by heat and the noise of the chants, a day of people trampled, and of the brutality and bullying of the party faithful. But Fathi presses treacherously against the crowd, attempting just to visit his mother and his girlfriend. The Silence and the Roar is a personal, urgent, funny and aggrieved novel. It asks what it means to have a conscience, or to laugh, or to endure in a time of the violence, strangeness and roar of tyranny. It is both a true literary achievement and an act of real courage by a brilliant Syrian writer.