The Notebook of Sorrowful Elders

An old man waits out a plague in the mountains, with only his books, two stray dogs, and the company of everyone he has outlived. Down in the city below, the news is that the sickness kills only the old, and people have begun repeating it like good news.

The young men come for their elders. They pull them from closets and water tanks, hunt them through the neighborhoods in pickup trucks, and burn the nursing home to the ground. A city that survived the Ba'ath regime, the mass graves, and the chemical attacks has discovered an appetite for cruelty entirely its own. It has decided it can be young again, but the old are the price.

Mardin Ibrahim, novelist, poet, and the Kurdish translator of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, tells this story through the one man still keeping a record of it: a widower in his seventies, sifting through a lifetime of murdered friends and vanished villages while the city below him agrees, quietly and completely, to forget what it has done.

For readers of Blindness and The Plague, The Notebook of Sorrowful Elders arrives in English for the first time: a novel about what a place will do to survive itself, and who it decides to leave behind.