Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir

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‘In stunning detail . . . Baconi traces a story of personal and communal alienation, longing, and liberation’Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This’Moving and generous’Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost’Luminous, moving, and achingly beautiful’Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King ‘I am forever changed after reading this book’Javier Zamora, author of Solito’A deeply inspiring and absorbing read’Mark Gevisser, author of The Pink Line’Spending time with the real people in Fire in Every Direction is a delight’Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humour and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness – desire and resistance – is passed down through generations. In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life – still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi. After relocating to London, Tareq hopes to put aside his past. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him. Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home.