The Silence and the Roar

It should be required reading... it's Sirees's light touch with his subject matter that lends The Silence and the Roar so much of its power... It breaks the heart * Guardian *
This is a small dystopian treasure of Gogolian texture, nightmarish but light, self-referential but never pretentious. Eerie, banal, yet bearing the cold imprint of reality, Sirees's vision of tyranny, superlatively translated, is distinctive enough to be ranked with Orwell, Huxley or Marquez's -- Robin Yassin-Kassab * Independent *
Syrian writer Sirees takes on, with piercing insight, the huge themes of freedom, individuality, integrity, and, yes, love, in this beautiful, funny, and life-affirming novel * Publishers Weekly *
Profound and topical ... a chilling portrait of a people whose lives are dominated by fear -- Lucy Popescu * Independent on Sunday *
An excellent novel ... while The Silence and the Roar is a slender novel, it is far from slight -- Malcolm Forbes * The National *
The theatre of the absurd that is everyday life in a totalitarian society is the subject of Nihad Sirees's urgent new novel, a searing political allegory in the tradition of Orwell and Camus. The portrait of a banned writer wandering the streets of a nameless dictatorship that Arab readers will recognize all too well, Sirees's book would be unbearably bleak if it weren't so funny: its narrator's caustic irreverence is his rebellion against the tyrant's roar that would reduce him to silence -- Adam Shatz
In this short, satiric fable, a formerly famous writer silenced by an authoritarian regime finds himself in a predicament where Kafka meets Catch-22 * Kirkus *
With biting humor Nihad Sirees reveals the extraordinary injustices of ordinary life under the oppressive rule of the Leader. This country remains unnamed but the richly rendered story illuminates the hard reality of the many Middle Eastern states in political transition today -- Shahan Mufti
A chillingly prophetic novel. In spare, razor-sharp prose, Sirees describes the effects of authoritative rule on the psyche of an unbreakable and irrepressible artist. Timely, powerful, and searing -- Randa Jarrar
A dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship -- Qantara * Susanna Schanda *
Called the Kafka of the Middle East, [Sirees] dismantles with metaphoric touches all the apparatus of a system that compress the individual and his freedom of speech * France Inter *
[Sirees] lasciviously mocks with a caustic irony the one he names 'the leader' * Le Journal du Dimanche *