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Start giftingNo Knives in the Kitchens of This City
A Novel
Narrator
Stephen Lee
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Translator
Leri Price
Length
7 hours 22 minutes
Language
English
WINNER OF THE NAQUIB MAHFOUZ MEDAL FOR LITERATURE
In the once beautiful city of Aleppo, one family descends into ruin in this novel from "one of the rising stars of Arab fiction" (New York Times)
Irrepressible Sawsan flirts with militias, the ruling party, and finally religion, seeking but never finding salvation. She and her siblings and mother are slowly choked in violence and decay, as their lives are plundered by a brutal regime.
Set between the 1960s and 2000s, No Knives in the Kitchens of this City unravels the systems of fear and control under Assad. With eloquence and startling honesty, it speaks of the persecution of a whole society.
Khaled Khalifa was born in 1964 in a village close to Aleppo, Syria. He is the author of several novels, including most recently, Death Is Hard Work, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. No Knives in the Kitchens of This City was awarded the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013, was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, and was shortlisted for the American Literary Translators Association’s National Translation Awards in the prose category in 2017. He lives in Damascus, a city he has refused to abandon despite the danger posed by the ongoing Syrian civil war.
Stephen Lee is a voice artist, actor, and poet from London with numerous credits in voicework for Sega, MOX Creative, Words and Pics, and Book Buddy Media, as well as screen work for NBC and the Amazon Prime series, Hanna. No Knives in the Kitchens of This City is his debut audiobook.
Leri Price is an independent Arabic-English translator who studied at the University of Edinburgh. She is the translator of Khaled Khalifa's In Praise of Hatred and Death Is Hard Work, as well as literature from Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Saudi Arabia including Sarab by Raja Alem (Hoopoe, 2018.)
Reviews
"Khaled Khalifa writes about his native city with sensuality and an almost feral intensity. . . . No Knives in the Kitchens of This City offers a glimpse into how terrified and empty of hope the people of a city must be to rise up in revolt. The future offers them nothing. It is a castle of closed doors. . . . The sights, smells and horror of living in Aleppo come pounding to life in this book. The place, to me, is no longer an abstraction, and Mr. Khalifa clearly fears for its fate throughout."—The New York Times"Intricately plotted, chronologically complicated and a pleasure to read. . . . The writing is superb--a dense, luxurious realism pricked with surprising metaphors. It is lyrical, sensuous and so semantically rich that at times it resembles a prose poem . . . . A sad but beautiful book, providing important human context to the escalating Syrian tragedy."—The Guardian
"Khalifa writes a raw, exquisite account of the Assad regime's loosening grip on [Syria] and the accompanying chaos."—Washington Independent Review of Books
"[Khalifa] surprises and shocks"—Charles Glass, The New York Review of Books
"Critically acclaimed . . . [No Knives in the Kitchens of this City] traces the degrading and destructive impact of Syria's dictatorship on the lives of a family from Aleppo."—Financial Times
"Required reading for anyone who wants to better understand the roots of the uprising and current conflict in Syria."—Literary Hub
"A searing indictment of the Syrian regime."—The National Expand reviews