Description
Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it.
RODDY DOYLE, author of Love
THE BESTSELLING MEMOIR - SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR
'I carry my troubled homeland within me; I hide it like a crime.'
Growing up in conservative Saudi Arabia, Suad Aldarra felt stifled by the strictures placed on women. She yearned for the vibrant Syrian streets of her family's origin. When the opportunity arose to study at Damascus University, she jumped at the chance to move to a city she loved and to experience a degree of freedom she'd never known.
But when the war started, everything changed. Suddenly Suad was thrown into a world of relentless pressure desperately looking for a way out. Her degree in software engineering was the saving grace that allowed her to travel to Ireland on a working visa. Yet reaching safety came at a price ...
I Don't Want to Talk About Home is not a memoir about war and destruction. It's not about camps or boats. It's about the enduring love for a home that ceased to exist, building a life out of the rubble, and the parts of yourself you lose and find when integrating into a new world.
Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book.
LOUISE O'NEILL, author of Idol
Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom... a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. I literally couldn't put this book down.
JAN CARSON author of The Raptures
About the Author
Suad Aldarra is a writer and data scientist based in Dublin. She was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents. In 2003 she moved back to her family home in Syria to study software engineering. After fleeing the war in 2012 she lived in Egypt and the US, before eventually settling in Ireland. In 2021, Suad was awarded the Art Councils of Ireland English Literature bursary. I Don't Want to Talk About Home is her debut memoir.
Reviews
Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it. -- Roddy Doyle, author of Love
Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom, I Don't Want To Talk About Home addresses complex issues about identity, belonging and family. This book took me on a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. Suad Aldarra possesses a rare gift to when it comes to storytelling; I literally couldn't put this book down. -- Jan Carson, author of The Raptures
Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book. -- Louise O'Neill, author of Idol
This is a heart-wrenching memoir. Suad's courage, resilience and determination to find a place she can now call home, shines through. A beautiful book that I read in one sitting. -- Sinead Moriarty, author of Yours, Mine, Ours
It is difficult to convey in a few words how much I loved this book. Full of heart-wrenching moments, it moved me to tears frequently, tears of both empathy and joy.
A beautiful evocation of a lost home and a lost homeland, tender, heartfelt, elegiac, full of humorous and wry observations that create a vivid picture of a vibrant world little known, understood, or appreciated in the west, it gives identity, humanity, and dignity to all those too often dismissed as faceless and nameless 'refugees' or 'migrants.'
Book Information
ISBN 9781529177138
Author Suad Aldarra
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Penguin (Transworld)
Publisher Transworld Publishers Ltd
Weight(grams) 220g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 127mm * 19mm
