As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow follows Salama, an eighteen-year-old pharmacy student who finds herself volunteering at a hospital in the Syrian city of Homs, performing amputations and removing shrapnel as bombs fall around her. Desperate to get herself and her pregnant sister-in-law to safety before it is too late, she is also, impossibly, falling in love, while a figure only she can see embodies everything she fears most.
My Review
This book didn’t just touch me. It shattered something, and I haven’t quite put it back together since.
“It doesn’t hurt for you to think about your future. We don’t have to stop living because we might die. Anyone might die at any given moment, anywhere in the world. We’re not an exception. We just see death more regularly than they do”
Salama was a pharmacy student when the Syrian Revolution began. She still had her parents, her brother, her home, a normal teenage life. By the time we meet her, she is volunteering at a hospital in Homs, performing amputations and extracting shrapnel while bombs fall outside, haunted by a manifestation of her own fear she has named Khawf, a figure only she can see who presses her constantly toward escape. Her sister-in-law Layla is pregnant. Time is running out. And then she meets Kenan, and suddenly leaving becomes the hardest thing imaginable.
Zoulfa Katouh wrote every word as though it cost her something, and you feel that on every page. The story is gut-wrenching in the way that only the most honest fiction can be, not manipulative, not performative, but simply true. It mirrors a reality that hundreds of thousands of people have lived, and it does not let you look away from what that reality means: children contemplating their own mortality, families torn apart, innocence stolen by circumstances no human being should ever have to survive.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but sit with my own privilege. Clean water. A roof. The freedom to breathe without fear. These are things I have never once had to fight for, and Salama fights for them on every single page.
What lifts this above devastation is hope. Not easy hope, not false comfort, but the stubborn, fiercely human insistence that goodness persists even in the darkest places. And Kenan and Salama, finding each other in the middle of all of it: I am so grateful for them. They deserve every happiness the world has to offer.
“It reminds me that as long as the lemon trees grow, hope will never die.”
One of the most important books I have ever read. Five stars, without hesitation.