As civil war comes to Beirut, the lives of three teenagers—a student, a nurse, and a sniper—become intertwined in a city reduced to a battleground. Rules are made and remade, and everyone is at once victim and perpetrator, helping to keep their landscapes of violence alive.

'As timely as today's headline, and as timeless as a Levantine love song, Abbas El-Zein draws on his own experience of Beirut's bitter war to create a novel that is elegant and elegiac. This writer has the rarest combination of gifts: a scientist's precision and a poet's eloquence.' — Geraldine Brooks, internationally bestselling, Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist

Abbas El-Zein has written for numerous newspapers and literary journals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Meanjin, and HEAT Magazine. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Leave to Remain (2009), also in the Untapped Collection, and the short story collection The Secret Maker of the World (2014). His novel Tell the Running Water was first published in 2001.