The release date for the English version of 'As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow' by
Zoulfa Katouh is Sep 2022. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
Salama Kassab was a student of pharmacy when the Syrian revolution began. She still had her house; she still had her parents and older brother. Her life as a teenager was typical.
Salama now works as a volunteer at a Homs hospital, tending to the injured patients that come in every day. However, she is secretly yearning to leave her beloved nation before Layla, her sister-in-law, delivers birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.
But Salama is divided between her commitment to survival and her allegiance to her nation, even if Khawf is pressuring her to leave. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And she begins to question her decision to leave home altogether until she happens to run into the guy she was meant to meet that fateful day.
Salama is going to have to select how she will scream out for Syria's liberation and soon come to perceive the events around her for what they really are—a revolution rather than a war.