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by Seraj Assi (Author)
In a world scarred by indiscriminate bombing, forced starvation,
and mass displacement, a nameless survivor lies crushed beneath the
rubble of a bombing--alive, but barely.
Entombed in darkness
with no hope of rescue, he must navigate the thin edge between life and
death using only his hearing, sense of smell, and the volatile power of
his imagination. Above him a genocide unfolds. Below, in his fragile
pocket of air, he begins to witness it in ways no unburied survivor ever
could.
As hours blur into days, hallucination and reality weave
together. Memories seep through the cracks. Fantastical visions rise
from the dust. In this liminal state, he gains a strange, heightened
clarity, an almost supernatural insight known only to those suspended
between worlds, the mortally wounded who hover in the space where time
fractures and the mind sharpens to a blade.
What begins as
desperate escapism becomes a haunting chronicle of a people forced
underground by violence, a nation living beneath the weight of another's
cruelty. In the darkness, he discovers a grim sanctuary: the rubble is a tomb but also a refuge from the firestorm above.
A
wartime tale of resilience amid annihilation, Seraj Assi's debut novel plunges
readers into the intimate terror of one man's confinement and the
collective suffering of his shattered homeland. As he reflects, "Being
under the rubble is a strange thing. . . . You're clinging to life not
to live, but to defy death. Just because you're breathing doesn't mean
you're alive. You're a ghost, and your homeland is but a ghostland."
This is the story of a people driven underground not by myth or choice, but by force: "We are subterranean only because others refuse to allow us our place under the sun."
