Songs for Darkness

A novel that captures the collective pain of a nation through the stories of four Lebanese women.

Only songs are able to comfort the soul in its darkness--but can anyone hear them?

Iman Humaydan's saga recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment.

Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away from her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion.

These women's legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honoring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently preserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice--and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times.

Author: Iman Humaydan
Publisher: Interlink Books
Published: 03/10/2026
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.45lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.20w x 0.50d
ISBN13: 9781623715625
ISBN10: 1623715628
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Middle Eastern & Arab American
- Fiction | Family Life | Multigenerational
- Fiction | Women

About the Author
Iman Humaydan Younes is a Lebanese novelist and freelance journalist. Her first novel Baa Mithl Beit Mithl Beirut (B for Bait for Beirut) received wide international acclaim and was translated into English, French and German. Wild Mulberries is her second novel. Her third novel, Haywat Okhra (Other Lives), will be released in Beirut in 2008 by Al Massar. Many of her short stories appeared in the cultural pages of Lebanese and Arabic newspapers and magazines such as Mulhak An Nahar, As Safir, Al Hasna'a, and Sayidati. Younes studied anthropology at the American University of Beirut. She wrote Neither Here Nor There: Narratives of the Families of the Disappeared in Lebanon and conducted and published studies on environmental and development issues of post-war Lebanon. Michelle Hartman is Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature and Language at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University. Her main area of research is Modern Arabic Literature, specializing in Lebanese women's writing. She is the translator (with Maher Barakat) of Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib's acclaimed novel Just Like a River.

Michelle Hartman is a literary translator and professor of Arabic literature at McGill University. She has translated more than a dozen novels from Arabic to English including three other novels by Iman Humaydan, The Weight of Paradise, Other Lives, and Wild Mulberries. Her latest translation is A Long Walk from Gaza (Interlink, 2024). She has also written on Lebanese women and the Civil War in two co-authored volumes (with Malek Abisaab), Women's War Stories: The Lebanese Civil War, Women's Labor and the Creative Arts (Syracuse UP, 2022) and What the War Left Behind: Women's Stories of Resistance and Struggle in Lebanon (Syracuse UP, 2024).