Letters From Zaatar

When Zohrab Anmahouni, an Armenian-American architect in Los Angeles, accepts the unlikely post of Consul General to the distant kingdom of Zaatar, he imagines a temporary escape from routine. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a landscape of suffocating heat, political absurdity, and a loneliness he has never known.Separated from his wife and children, Zohrab watches his life unravel as he tries to make sense of a city that is crumbling around him, a river that shifts between drought and sudden floods, and a government that seems to exist only in name. In this emotional void, he forms a fragile and complicated bond with his neighbor, Nakhshi, a connection born not out of romance but from the simple need to feel alive.Both darkly funny and quietly devastating, Letters from Zaatar is a novel about exile, midlife reckoning, and the unsettling clarity that emerges when everything familiar falls away. Read more