Young Adam Awad, his wife and daughter live in the remote village of his family, in the Lebanese countryside where his uncle maintains there are no “vendettas and bloody feuds like in the North, no history of arms and bloodshed”.
He wants to restore his father’s olive press house and live an idyllic life farming in peace, but it is 1976 and the civil war is closing in. The village becomes divided, but still Adam is determined to find a way to stop the escalation…
Jad El Hage comments: “The most recent of our wars began in the 1970s and ended by stages in the early 1990s, depending on how one defines ‘beginning’ and ‘end’. This uncertainty characterised the entire conflict. The only certainty is that we killed each other for more than fifteen years.”
Jad El Hage was born and grew up in Beirut. He has worked as a journalist since he was sixteen – with the Arab press, the BBC World Service in London, Radio Monte Carlo (Paris) and Harlequin Arab World in Athens. In 1985 he emigrated to Australia with his family. He has one novel, The Last Migration, written in English like The Myrtle Tree, and in Arabic, a novel and collections of poetry and of short stories, as well as two plays staged, with selected works translated into French, German Spanish and Dutch. He divides his time between Melbourne and a small village in north Lebanon.
Better than any political analysis, this remarkable novel, set in a Lebanese mountain village, conveys with razor-sharp accuracy the sights, sounds, tastes and tragic dilemmas of Lebanon’s fratricidal civil war. A must read… — Patrick Seale
 | 24 January 2008 |
| Reviewed by customer: cecile yazbek |
The Myrtle Tree reflects the author’s love of the Lebanese countryside and its peoples, in an accessible and captivating story using characters that live on the page and live on in the reader’s mind.
It could be located anywhere and at any time but as a reader of long-ago Lebanese origin, I was particularly moved to find a familiarity of thought and feeling in his language.
El Hage quietly leads the reader into the secret places of the culture as well as the hearts and minds of people carried unwittingly into war: the consequences, therefore, have a powerful impact.
His other novel in English, The Last Migration, ‘ a novel of love and diaspora’ – the word diaspora evoking so much of the pain that Lebanese migrants carry as the country regularly experiences tumults and tragedies – sows the seed of terrible loss in every encounter of love.
He is an author who subtly, through lyrical multi-layered writing, grabs his reader’s guts.
Cecile Yazbek is the author of Olive trees around my table -Growing up Lebanese in the old South Africa.
cecile yazbek |
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| 07 July 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: Miriam Shlesinger |
It's an incredibly beautiful book. The ability to portray the behind-the-scenes atrocities of war and the beauty of the human spirit with equal skill is a gift that so few authors have. The fictional setting of Wahdeh comes to life through your vivid and beautiful – and tragic – depiction of the "ordinary people" whose lives are forever marred by the insanity all around them. It is a book that deserves to be translated into as many languages as possible
Miriam Shlesinger,
Tel Aviv
Miriam Shlesinger |
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| 17 June 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: Denise Baraki Mack |
The Author's skill in blending the political, the personal, the sense of place and the deep essence of Lebanon and its people made the book a page turner.
The characters and the landscape stayed with me long after I reached ‘the end’.
Thank you.
Denise Baraki Mack |
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| 16 May 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: Michel Verdon |
It is a very masterly demonstration, a spell-binding book, a mixture of dreams and dreadful reality, the creation of a very good artist.
Michel Verdon
Montreal Michel Verdon |
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| 29 March 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: georges salameh |
...What is seized in this novel is just a presence and nothing else. What matters is not to describe Adam's memory of a civil war but to experience with him the immersion, in the present and the past, of a personal rural space and dream, to also outline a narrative net between his memory and us, and to finally surrender to the challenge of participating in what we discover to be the living memory of lebanon.
Georges Salameh
Palermo
georges salameh |
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| 07 March 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: joseph camilleri |
Deeply personal, yet passionately engaged with society and politics, the Myrtle
Tree is a memorable account of Lebanon's recent history. Through the lives of
its main characters, sketched with an engaging blend of realism and empathy, we
see how the approaching violence is about to engulf the country. We follow these
events through the eyes of the principal character and narrator, who paints for
us a vivid picture of village life in Wahdeh, its customs and traditions, its
hopes and the ominous clouds that threaten its future. In a subtly crafted
narrative, we live through the deeply felt tensions, both personal and social,
between the pull of the city and attachment to the land, between love and
hatred, between violence and the yearning for peace, between the 'home' country
and the attractions of a 'new world'.
joseph Camilleri
professor of international relations at Latrobe University, Melbourne
joseph camilleri |
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| 02 March 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: lina baker |
I truly enjoyed reading the Myrtle Tree; I was looking forward to the evening so thatI could read on ... the village,the characters and basically the vision inhabited my day.
For me, what makes a good book is when I have a glimpse of the author's profound, naked wishes and desires even if for a fleeting moment; that's what makes me connect and it takes only one scene & I am hooked.
In The Myrtle Tree, I found such a scene; won't tell you which though and I guess you understand why!
Lina Baker-Montreal
lina baker |
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| 07 February 2007 |
| Reviewed by customer: Kylie Peterson |
I attended the book launch of the Myrtle Tree in Melbourne in January 2007 and I have just finished reading it. My best friend is Lebanese and she often talks about how misjudged the Lebanese are in Australia but the the book revealed the true essence of Lebanon. It's beauty, rich culture and hospitable spirit. Yes as Patrick Seale wrote on the book cover 'It is a MUST read'. Kylie Peterson |
