The Foghorn Echoes

(Hardback, Main)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Hussam and Wassim are teenaged boys living in Syria during America's invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.

Split between war-torn Damascus and Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

'"Treat your thoughts like hurt children. They haven't learned yet how to handle pain". So says a wise ghost in Danny Ramadan's sweeping and mesmerising story that spans time and mortal space so expertly and elegantly. This is a beautiful novel, written by a once hurt child and loved and deeply admired by another, me.' - Alan Cumming

Reviews

'Praise for Danny Ramadan:

'There are moments and scenes of intense clarity and poignancy that will stop readers in their tracks' - Irish Times

'A remarkable read. Danny Ramadan opens a world for his readers and guides them through it with sensitivity and suspense' - BERNHARD SCHLINK

'Studded with the kind of graceful poetry that makes the most hardened heart soar like a silktail . . . Ramadan has gifted his readers with a resistance manifesto coded with love' - DIRIYE OSMAN

'A complex portrait of placelessness' - Times Literary Supplement

'By turns sombre, fantastical, violent and tender, Ahmad Danny Ramadan's English-language debut is a gay son's conflicted love letter to Syria' - Globe and Mail

Author Bio

Danny Ramadan is an award-winning Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, storyteller and an LGBTQ-refugee activist. His debut novel The Clothesline Swing won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction, was shortlisted for the Evergreen Award and the Sunburst Award and was named as a finalist for the Gay Fiction Category in the Lambda Awards. He is also the author of a children's picture book, Salma the Syrian Chef. Danny also translated Rafi Badawi's 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think and has published two collections of short stories in Arabic. He was awarded the StandOut Award for his social activism, the 2018 RBC's Top Immigrant in Canada award, and the Bonham Centre Award for Excellency. He lives in Vancouver with his husband.

@TheDannyRamadan | dannyramadan.com