A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 This astonishing book by the prize-winning journalist Rania Abouzeidtells the tragedy of the Syrian War through the dramatic stories of four young people seeking safety and freedom in a shattered country.
Extending back to the first demonstrations of 2011, No Turning Back dissects the tangle of ideologies and allegiances that make up the Syrian conflict. As protests ignited in Daraa, some citizens were brimming with a sense of possibility. A privileged young man named Suleiman posted videos of the protests online, full of hope for justice and democracy. A father of two named Mohammad, secretly radicalized and newly released from prison, saw a darker opportunity in the unrest. When violence broke out in Homs, a poet named Abu Azzam became an unlikely commander in a Free Syrian Army militia. The regime’s brutal response disrupted a family in Idlib province, where a nine-year-old girl opened the door to a military raid that caused her father to flee. As the bombings increased and roads grew more dangerous, these people’s lives intertwined in unexpected ways.
Rania Abouzeid brings readers deep inside Assad’s prisons, to covert meetings where foreign states and organizations manipulated the rebels, and to the highest levels of Islamic militancy and the formation of ISIS. Based on more than five years of clandestine reporting on the front lines, No Turning Back is an utterly engrossing human drama full of vivid, indelible characters that shows how hope can flourish even amid one of the twenty-first century’s greatest humanitarian disasters.
Rania Abouzeid has won the Michael Kelly Award and George Polk Award for foreign reporting, among many other prizes for international journalism. She has written for The New Yorker, Time, Foreign Affairs, Politico, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times. A former New America fellow, she lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
New York Times BestsellerNew York Times Book Review Editors’ ChoiceAn essential and groundbreaking text in
the effort to understand how American criminal justice went so badly awry. —Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and MeIn A Colony in a ...
A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the
beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period she kept ...
“An impressive and rich book that provides much-needed attention to Hitler’s other victims.”—Jewish Book WorldAs
persecution, war, and deportation savaged their communities, Jews tried to flee Nazi Europe through both legal and clandestine routes. In this riveting tale of Jewish ...
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist“Essential reading for the twenty-first [century].” —Radhika Jones, The
New York Times Book ReviewIn the first comprehensive biography of Mikhail Gorbachev, William Taubman shows how a peasant boy clambered to the top of a ...
A first-hand account of a Greek refugee camp—and the stories of the refugees staying thereSyrian
Kurd Juwan Azad left his home and family in Damascus in 2011 to flee military service under the al-Assad regime. After several troubled years as ...
The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Eleanor Roosevelt was right: Hoover’s FBI was an American gestapo.
—NewsweekShocking, grim, frightening, Curt Gentry’s masterful portrait of America’s top policeman is a unique political biography. From more than 300 interviews and over 100,000 ...
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History and one of the New
York Times’s 100 Notable Books of the Year.The assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin remains the single most consequential event in Israel’s recent history, ...
A potent wakeup call to pluralists in the coming showdown with Christian nationalists.—Publishers Weekly, starred
reviewMichelle Goldberg, a senior political reporter for Salon.com, has been covering the intersection of politics and ideology for years. Before the 2004 election, and during ...
