“No Knives in the Kitchens of This City” by Khaled Khalifa is a heartbreaking story of a Syrian family navigating Aleppo as politics, the president and loyalties ravage the city. Khalifa, who was born in Aleppo, is the author of four novels and the editor of the literary magazine Alif. He does not hold back in his descriptions of how Aleppo, from the 1960s to the 2000s, has fallen around families who have no choice but to live through the disasters. Translated into English by Leri Price in 2016, the novel won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2013 and was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014.
Khalifa’s story is told and retold by his characters who long for the past when life was not as difficult. Following one family, the novel reveals the story of a mother who died “ten years too late,” according to her son. Her family must find their way through the streets of Aleppo amid its dwindling lettuce fields, overcrowded streets and loyal party members looking for allegiances and punishing those who do not praise the leader as they do.
Not a loyalist and marred by misfortune, the mother must make do with her life, even if her son’s birthday is marked by the Ba’athist coup of 1963, an event in history she despises which makes her feel as if “her life was a collection of mistakes that could never be resolved.” Her life deteriorates slowly after she, a dreamy woman with dark eyes, marries for love and eventually is left by her husband for another woman. She is abandoned by her own family, except for her brother known as Uncle Nazir, and forced to continue life as a school teacher with three children and her shame. But as her own life takes a turn down a twisted and unplanned path, so does Syria’s and its beloved city of Aleppo.
The regime’s takeover is swift — it forcefully grasps the country and its people. Neither their lives nor their surroundings are in their hands anymore.
From the narrator’s grandfather Jalal Al-Nabulsi, who is “proud of being from a family which had been in Aleppo for a thousand years,” one of the first employees of the Railway Institute and one of the only witnesses to the inception of the Syrian railway system, to a mother who “perpetually extolled the past and conjured it up with delight as a kind of revenge for her humble life,” to Sawsan who at first is irrepressible and then “immersed herself into radicalism and fatwas day after day,” Khalifa’s book weaves through the generations of the family.
His book depicts a fading picture, one that was once vibrant and full of life. He moves from Aleppo to Midan Akbas and back, through dusty roads and the Cinema Opera where childhoods were filled with Egyptian and Bollywood movies “with happy endings.” He tells the stories of women who leaf through trinkets and forgotten wares in the Bab Al-Nasr second-hand shop and bring them back to life to feel a semblance of magic. As “walking in the streets had become a terrifying experience” and violence and temperamental political attitudes take hold, his sentences and metaphors captivate the reader and will immerse you in Syria.
Time and age weigh heavily on the pages as a collapsing life and city add to the darkness that begins to take hold of Aleppo. Tales of love and dreams, of faded images that serve as motivation to move forward, are rampant. Mother manages to move on when she believes she is “divorced, not abandoned,” but for others, it is a little more difficult to convince themselves and find inspiration to move forward.
Khalifa’s book is reminiscent of Turkish novelist Sabahattin Ali’s style in the manner in which he hints that it is life that shapes people and not people who shape life. Like Ali, Khalifa’s story is about how circumstance decides the path one’s life will take. His love for the city and for Syria is ever-present in his every description and metaphor. He can enchant the reader with details of the city and its history, its buildings and the “rising fumes of death and the fear present in every street and on the face of every man and woman hurrying home in the early evening.”
But amid the fear are pockets of people who cling to music and passionate love, who attempt to keep hate away and defy the powers that be. Within the dark alleyways and molding walls, art, poetry and theater flourish. Sometimes, the characters live in their own momentary bubbles and are blind to the outside world in their pursuit of self-discovery and purpose. But ultimately, they are forced back to face the world and themselves.
In the darkness are bouts of light, but it is neither bright nor long-lasting and that is the truth and reality of Syria. Despite this, the resilience of Khalifa’s characters in their journeys is hopeful. This book paints horrifying pictures as beautifully as it does optimistic ones. Khalifa’s writing is whole, his sentences memorable, his characters strong and fearless. His strength lies in his ability to reveal harsh truths and ugly realities beautifully, to bring through the seas of hate, love and resilience.
In the end, when life hangs on by a thread, there is hope amid the pessimism as “Aleppo still embodied a dream of wealth and urbanity even though three-fourths of it had turned into slums unfit for human habitation.”
Book Review: A Syrian family stands tall as Aleppo falls
Book Review: A Syrian family stands tall as Aleppo falls

What We Are Reading Today: The Thinking Machine

- It explores Huang’s leadership style—described as single-minded and relentless—and his ability to defy Wall Street skepticism to push a radical computing vision, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley
Author: Stephen Witt
“The Thinking Machine” is the story of how Nvidia evolved to supplying hundred-million-dollar supercomputers.
It is a biography that dives into the rise of Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, focusing on their pivotal role in the AI revolution.
The book highlights Huang’s bold vision, particularly his early bet on AI over a decade ago, which transformed Nvidia from a maker of video game components into a powerhouse supplying massive supercomputers for AI applications like hyper-realistic avatars, autonomous robots, and self-driving cars.
It explores Huang’s leadership style—described as single-minded and relentless—and his ability to defy Wall Street skepticism to push a radical computing vision, making him one of the wealthiest and most influential figures in Silicon Valley.
Through unprecedented access to Huang, his friends, his investors, and his employees, Stephen Witt documents for the first time the company’s epic rise and its single-minded and ferocious leader, now one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures.
Witt is an American journalist and author known for his narrative-driven, deeply reported works on technology, culture, and innovation.
Witt’s style is noted for its clarity, wit, and ability to make dense topics accessible without sacrificing depth.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Evolution of Imperfection’

Author: Laurence D. Hurst
If we start with the presumption that evolution is a constantly improving process, some aspects of our evolution just do not make sense. We have a high rate of genetic diseases, for example, and much of our DNA seems to be pointless.
In “The Evolution of Imperfection,” Laurence Hurst explores our apparently rotten genetic luck.
Hurst, a leading authority on evolution and genetics, argues that our evolutionary imperfections proceed directly from two features: the difficulties of pregnancy and the fact that historically there are relatively few of us.
In pregnancy, natural selection can favor chromosomes that kill embryos in species (including ours) that continuously receive resources from the mother. Most fertilized eggs don’t make it, and incompatibilities between the fetus and mother can lead to lethal disorders of pregnancy.
The historically small population size enhances the role of chance, which in turn leads to both accumulation of unnecessary DNA and more mutation.
REVIEW: Kuwaiti Palestinian author looks at women and disability in a transformative, speculative memoir

JEDDAH: Kuwaiti Palestinian writer Shahd Alshammari’s new speculative memoir “Confetti and Ashes” is a bold departure from her previous work “Head Above Water,” which was longlisted for the Barbellion Prize in 2022.
Alshammari’s layered meditation on the disabled body as both a site of loss as well as endurance is propelled forward by sharp observations and a quiet brilliance that had me turning pages well into the night.
Her first memoir, “Head Above Water,” offered an unflinching look at navigating multiple sclerosis as an Arab woman teaching literature in Kuwait. Her latest, however, ventures into a realm where memory and personal narrative intersect with poetry, imagination, and otherworldly presences.
The voices of ghosts and Zari, her qareen — the jinn-companion assigned to each person in Islamic belief — transform Alshammari’s personal narrative. It becomes a dialogue, a captivating dance between the seen and unseen worlds.
This inclusion shakes up the conventional memoir structure to broaden the scope beyond Western frameworks of storytelling. It also offers readers a visceral look at the ways living with disability and chronic illness can disrupt and reshape an individual’s perspective and worldview.
The dreamlike and omniscient voice of the qareen also mirrors the disorientation and internal struggles that come with living with chronic illness and disability.
Alshammari astutely draws parallels between the disabled body and the female body in the social and cultural context of Kuwait. In a world of able-bodied norms, she reflects on their intersecting experiences of marginalization, scrutiny, and resistance.
She rejects predictable storytelling, and not just in her writing, but also in life. Her body rebels, yet she defies societal stigmas — including concerns voiced from other women with MS.
She explores holistic wellness practices and eventually takes up squash, expanding her social circle and pushing her limits to build her mental and physical endurance.
In capturing her dual journeys of illness and wellness, the author invites readers to reflect on the disabled body not as a burden, but as a site of poetic possibility.
In “Confetti and Ashes,” Alshammari presents a profound reclamation of the self and cements herself as a vital voice in reimagining the female disabled experience.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Whale: The Illustrated Biography’ by Asha De Vos

Whales are the majestic giants of the ocean, yet much of their world remains a mystery to us. The routes of their vast oceanic migrations are largely elusive, as are the intricacies of their behavior and social dynamics.
This narrative biography takes you out beyond our shorelines and into the depths, providing an up-close exploration of the life of the whale.
Written by internationally acclaimed expert Asha de Vos, “Whale: The Illustrated Biography” blends engaging profiles of the best-known species with stunning illustrations to tell the story of these magnificent creatures in all their diversity and complexity.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Measure of Progress’ by Diane Coyle

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today.
In “The Measure of Progress,” Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers.
When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy?