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Novels are born in different ways. Some lucky writers have eureka moments and magic-up original concepts and bold outlines. Others are forced to sift and sort hazy thoughts and germs of ideas, shaping them over time into something resembling a narrative. For author Layla Al Ammar, the issues that form the background to her second novel had been incubating in her mind for years, but only as hard facts.
“These were issues that I’d been deeply absorbed in from early 2011,” she says, “and I had followed their developments closely – from the Arab uprisings across the region, the civil war in Syria, the refugee crisis, and the rise of the alt-right and nationalist rhetoric around the world. I had done all of this without consciously thinking that I would put it into a novel.”