Ali Momen has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 5 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 455 ratings. The most-rated is Homes.
Homes
Summary
In 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria - just before the Syrian civil war broke out. Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was 10 years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war zone: horrific, unimaginable events punctuated by normalcy - soccer, cousins, video games, friends. Homes is the remarkable true story of how a young boy emerged from a war zone - and found safety in Canada - with a passion for sharing his story and telling the world what is truly happening in Syria. As told to her by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, writer Winnie Yeung has crafted a heartbreaking, hopeful, and urgently necessary book that provides a window into understanding Syria.
©2018 Winnie Yeung (P)2019 Audible, Inc.
Beirut Hellfire Society
Summary
Finalist for Scotiabank Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
An explosive new novel from the award-winning, best-selling author of De Niro's Game and Cockroach.
It is 1978 in Beirut, Lebanon, partway through that country's Civil War. On a torn-up street overlooking a cemetery in the city's Christian enclave, we meet an eccentric young man named Pavlov, the son of a local undertaker. When his father meets a sudden and untimely death, Pavlov is approached by a colourful member of the mysterious Hellfire Society - a secret group to which his father had belonged. The Society's purpose is to arrange burial or cremation for those who for various reasons have been outcast and abandoned by family, clergy, and state. Pavlov agrees to take up his father's work for the society, and over the course of the novel he becomes a survivor-chronicler of his embattled and fading community, bearing witness to its enduring rituals as well as its inevitable decline.
Deftly combining comedy with tragedy, Beirut Hellfire Society is at once propulsive, elegiac, outrageous, profane, and transcendent - a profoundly moving meditation on what it means to live through war. It asks what, if anything, can be accomplished or preserved in the face of certain change and imminent death. Here is an exhilarating, subversive, beautiful and timely new work that reinforces Rawi Hage's status as one of our most original, necessary, fearless, and important writers.
©2018 Rawi Hage (P)2018 Knopf Canada
Night of Power
Summary
"A searing and beautiful novel." (Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes and The Illegal)
Featured on CBC's "30 Books to Read Now"
A portrait of a Muslim family - from the heady days in Uganda to hard times in a new country, and the tragic accident that forces them to confront the ghosts of the past
It's 1998. And Mansoor Visram has lived in Canada for 25 years, ever since dictator Idi Amin expelled South Asians from Uganda. As a refugee with a wife and child, Mansoor has tried his best to recreate the life they once had, but starting over in Canada has been much harder than he expected. He's worked as a used car salesman, as a gas station attendant, and now he runs a small dry cleaner in suburban Calgary. But he's hatching plans for a father-and-son empire that will bring back the wealth and status the Visrams enjoyed in Uganda.
The problem is, his son Ashif does not share his dreams, and he's moved across the country to get away from his father. He's a rising star at a multi-national corporation in Toronto, on the cusp of a life-changing promotion, but he can't seem to forget his girlfriend from long ago. Mansoor's wife, Layla, has spent the past decade running her own home-cooking business and trying to hold her family together. But Ashif rarely comes home to visit and Mansoor's pride has almost ruined their marriage. As the fissures that began generations ago - and continents away - reappear, Mansoor, Ashif, and Layla drift further and further apart.
On the Night of Power, a night during Ramadan when fates are decided for the next year, a terrible accident occurs. Will the Visrams survive this latest tragedy?
Night of Power is a heart-wrenching story of a family in crisis. Gripping and unforgettable, Anar Ali's debut novel vividly illuminates the injustices of displacement and the nuances of identity - of losing a home and coming home again.
Number one on the Edmonton Best Seller List
One of CBC's list of "Fiction to Watch for This Fall"
Toronto Star's "Five Books That’ll Take You to New Neighbourhoods"
©2019 Anar Ali (P)2019 Penguin