Varshaw Chandī Pīsh: Persian 1403

The story begins in 1945, with the narrator's first exit from a Nazi concentration camp, his entry with other prisoners among Soviet forces, who distributed bread among them and washed the dust of captivity from their bodies with water. The mental conflicts of the narrator - Joseph, a Polish Jew - begin here; thrown out of a death camp, a survivor among the dead, and a refugee among religions and faiths. But, like most people involved in the war, he is only looking for a place and a possibility to live. In all the lines of the book, Ahmed Mohsen skillfully keeps the war alive and present: whether in Poland, Lebanon, or Palestine. The author tries to portray the complexities of the human soul with a simple and restrained narrative; knots that, while complex, end in one word: war. Warsaw is a story about the inhumanity of war and the wounds that sometimes remain unhealed for generations to come. The book has two first-person narrators, one starting in 1945 and the other in 1982. Youssef, a Lebanese musician, is the father of a son killed in the Palestinian-Israeli wars, and the grandfather of a grandson named Joseph. Joseph is a son who has a close relationship with his grandfather and, out of love for him, becomes a pianist and travels together. Ahmed Mohsen (1984, Beirut) is a Lebanese writer whose first book, The Game Maker, was nominated for the Sheikh Zayed Literary Prize in 2014. He studied economics at the Arab University of Beirut and has been a journalist for various Lebanese newspapers since then. Warsaw was also recently nominated for the Arabic Booker Prize.