For a world evoked so vividly and minutely, with actors ranging from freedom fighters to street vendors to mechanics, much remains unspecified. Geographical details remain sparse, political preoccupations are largely absent from the book. By decontextualising her book in such a way, Kassab strips back the political machinations and complexities of war and homes in on the people it affects the most.

She’s far more concerned with the act of surviving day-to-day, the deeply human drive to stay alive. As such, we experience the calamities of war through the individual survivors and casualties of it, distilling the incomprehensibility of mass violence into identifiable stories of endurance, defiance and love.

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Kassab refuses to cast moral judgment on to her characters. Countering the widespread, latent dehumanisation of Arab men and the perceived barbarism of revolutions born out of the Arab world, Abdullah reiterates his wish for a regular life, to not be “a human being who only finds meaning in a fight”. A traitor of the movement is afforded compassion (if not by his peers, then by the author) as he expands upon his reasons for betraying his kin: his doubt that the war would ever end and a wish to protect his family.

The women in Politica are larger than life: cruel, traumatised, unruly, conflicted, always pushing against what’s expected of them. A young woman of few means inextricably ties her fate to that of an older man to secure a future for herself. An older woman contravenes social mores and invites her young male helper in for lunch every day. A dutiful, long-suffering wife drives her husband’s car off into the wilderness in a dizzying act of freedom.

Kassab’s polyphonic, fragmented storytelling approach has by now become her signature style, but it has never felt as urgent as it does in this latest work. Politica is an exercise in collective memory preservation, a steadfast refusal to forget.

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