Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life

‘While narrating death and destruction, the witnesses Yazbek spoke with still found a way to illustrate that, in the words of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, they taught life. Many insisted on showing Yazbek pictures of their families and of themselves when their bodies were still whole; some entrusted her with a list of names of the people they lost; they defied erasure by every means available to them.... Yazbek’s collection of testimonies, spanning the shattered lives of children as young as thirteen to the weary wisdom of the elderly, refutes the diminishment intended by the airdropped leaflets. If the leaflets claim their presence is a danger, Yazbek proves their erasure is the true catastrophe.’
— Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Arab Lit

‘A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced.Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away.’
— Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath

‘This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love.’
— A.L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country

‘Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence first hand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect and humility. She has once again modelled what it means to be a keeper of humanity’s memory.’
— Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction

'Piecing together the harrowing experiences of Palestinians in Gaza, this book lays bare not only the realities of Israel’s killing machine but also the blinding absence of justice. It holds together stories of a people already worn to the bone by decades of brutal oppression – blown apart, burned up, and, in some cases, literally evaporated into thin air. There is no reassuring rhetoric of resilience in the face of such horrors. Nor is Your Presence Is a Danger to Life simply a work of recovery and documentation. It is a call to action, demanding that we confront the unfathomable pain produced by dehumanizing structures of oppression and refuse to forget what has been done in Gaza.'
— Aimee Shalan, British Palestinian activist and writer

‘These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since 7 October 2023. Despite Israel’s genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies – shared with Yazbek and translated by Price – now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you – we – have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them.’
— Natasha Soobramanien, co-author (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia

‘Powerful and moving…bears comparison with George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia as a work of literature, Yazbek is a superb narrator ...  this is how she crosses the line from journalism to high literary art.’
— Andrew Hussey, Observer (praise for The Crossing)

‘An eloquent, gripping and harrowing account of the country’s decline into barbarism by an incredibly brave Syrian.’
— Barry Andrews, Irish Times (praise for The Crossing)