In 2005 Andy Warner traveled to Lebanon to study literature in Beirut, one of the world’s most cosmopolitan and storied cities.
Twenty-one years old and recently broken up from his girlfriend, Warner feels his life is both intense and directionless. Immersing himself in the vibrant and diverse city, he quickly befriends a group of students, many LGBTQ, including both foreigners and Lebanese, straddling different histories and embracing the freedoms of the multicultural city. Warner and his friends dance, do drugs, and hook up, even as violence breaks out in the city—the scars of a fifteen-year civil war reopening with a series of political assassinations and bombings.
As street protests grow and the city is rocked by political violence, Warner feels his grasp on reality slowly begin to slip as he confronts traumas in his past and anxiety over his future.
Illustrated in beautiful and intricate detail, Spring Rain is an absorbing and poignant graphic memoir of a young man’s attempt to gain control over his life as well as a portrait of a city and a nation’s struggle to define its future in the predawn of the Arab Spring.
