Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. Rima finds refuge in a fantasy world full of coloured crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur’an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits.
Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she’s crazy, but she is no fool the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta where, between bombings, she writes her story.
In Planet of Clay, Samar Yazbek offers a surreal depiction of the horrors taking place in Syria, in vivid and poetic language and with a sharp eye for detail and beauty.
Industry Reviews
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE
'Brave, rebellious and passionate … Yazbek is no ordinary Syrian dissident.'
Financial Times
'The Syrian writer Samar Yazbek evokes the horror of civil war with gripping lucidity.'
Le Monde
"One of Syria's most gifted novelists."
CNN
"Yazbek's is the urgent task of showing the world what is happening. Thanks to her, we can read about the appalling things that go on in secret, underground places."
The Guardian
Praise for Planet of Clay
" Planet of Clay is a devastating novel about human resilience and fragility in a time of war."
Foreword Reviews, starred review
"The young, mute narrator of this compassionate novel becomes a poignant emblem of the Syrian women confined by war...a bold portrayal of besieged people."
The Observer
"Rima is a fantastic character."
Kirkus Reviews
"The Syrian writer Samar Yazbek evokes the horror of civil war with gripping lucidity in her novel Planet of Clay."
Le Monde
"With the brazenness typical of her recent work, Samar Yazbek immerses us in the horror of the Syrian conflict, and the way it resonates in the flesh and minds of those who are living it. It is through the women whom the author has met on the ground at certain moments throughout this war that she describes the capacity for resistance in the face of atrocity."
Liberation
"An ingenious character and a literary approach on the verge of the unimaginable. Samar Yazbek's novel is brave on many levels."
Goeteborgs-Posten
" Planet of Clay is a deeply original, almost surreal fantasia, written in a simple, clear style. But the surrealistic stroke is raised, because the evil and the suffering surrounding Rima are real to such a great extent ... A novel like Planet of Clay filters through all our conscious and unconscious blinkers."
Arbetarbladet
"We others can only read--and cry."
Kristeligt Dagblad
"The book left this reader very touched, beyond the cruel reality it describes, because of Yazbek's sense of details."
Weekendavisen
"An invaluable voice from Syria."
Dagens Nyheter
"The text is true literally true, that is. How can you truly describe a rational chemical warfare? By letting the process behind the sense of the text break. A radical and visionary move made by Samar Yazbek."
Sveriges Radio
Praise for A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution:
"Amid the horrific news about Syrian dissidents, mass killings, and government claims of terrorists, this unique document, written in the first months of the uprising, is a chronicle both of objective events and the visceral and psychic responses of an impassioned activist and artist ... The book weaves journalistic reporting with intimate, poetic musings on an appalling reality."
Publishers Weekly
"A feverish, nightmarish, immediate account."
The Guardian
"An impassioned and harrowing memoir of the early revolt."
New York Review of Books
"Arresting, novelistic prose ... uncompromising reportage from a doomed capital."
The Spectator
