Holy shit this book was good. I kept stopping to stare at the prose, and there were so many moments of insight and beauty that it felt like it was packing a doorstopper into just under three hundred pages. 

The main story alternates between two gay men from Syria before and during the current war. They were lovers, once, then bad things happened, and one stayed and the other left and ended up in Vancouver, Canada. Both are fairly spectacularly not coping with their past trauma and current PTSD, one with too many drugs and too much unsafe sex, and the other folding in on himself and hiding in an abandoned house with a ghost as his only companion.

There's a lot of violence, a lot of Syrian history, the ghost tells her own story, healing happens in fits and starts. I liked how much a sense of place the Damascus scenes had, the city as its own character, while the Vancouver setting was almost blank at first. Neither man made the right or wrong choice about emigrating (and likely made the only choices he could), but possibility having done the opposite keeps pulling at each character, and gives the novel a distorted mirror feeling. But rather than being a structural affectation, each man (and the ghost) was all fully realised in their own right, and I was genuinely invested in what what had happened to them, what was going to happen to them, and if they'd ever find out the other was still alive.

Really beautiful book, and I'm excited to follow this author forward.