My Great Arab Melancholy

A beautiful, tragic, and award-winning book from Lebanese writer and illustrator Lamia Ziad. Blending the author's years of research, personal memoir, and more than 300 illustrations, this compelling history of the modern Arab world explores the major thinkers, struggles, and turning points that have shaped the Middle East as we know it today.

Ziad begins in South Lebanon, 'land of martyrs, ruins and passion', before taking the reader further afield, to Beirut, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Baghdad. The book moves from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, tracing the Arab world's tragedies and the derailing of dreams and possibilities caused in large part by Western imperialism and the conquest of Palestine.

Within these pages, there are the blasts of explosions, blood, tears and tragedy, cemeteries, wreaths and ribbons, martyrs, and paradise. Ziad unearths the buried memory of resistance fighters and their lost ideals. She celebrates the progressive, bold, revolutionary moments and figures of the Arab world's recent past.