As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Syrian Canadian Zoulfa Katouh is a lovely debut novel about eighteen-year-old pharmacy student Salama Kassab, who volunteers at a hospital in Homs, Syria, caring for those injured, including six-year-old Ahmad who died of internal bleeding, at the hands of the Syrian military.
Salama's father and her brother Hamza were imprisoned by the government the year before after going to a protest, and her mother killed a week later by a bomb. Salama hopes to escape the country with her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla, an artist.
Salama has PTSD, which takes the form of an imagined companion, Khawf, who frequently tells her what she must do to survive, even if it's a painful, and potentially horrific, choice. She finds love with Kenan, who has two younger siblings, thirteen-year-old Yusuf and nine-year-old Lama. She secures passage, eventually for all of them, out of Syria, with it to be via boat across the Mediterranean to Italy, from Am, whose sister she treated in the hospital. Salama finds out her father died and brother still held in prison, counter to her hope that they both no longer being tortured.
The book takes a unexpected turn as it comes out that Layla being alive was imagined by Salama, just like Khawf a figment of her PTSD. Layla had been killed by a sniper five months before. Salama then is told in her head by Khawf that the hospital about to be bombed, rushes there and tells Dr. Ziad to evacuate, saving many. Salama, Kenan, Yusuf, and Lama take the boat and jump overboard, leading to the Kenan's siblings safely in Germany with family, and Salama and Kenan in Toronto. It's an excellent book, with many events taken from real atrocities suffered by Syrians and inflicted by the dictatorship.
