Crossing years and continents, the harrowing story of the road to reunion for two Syrian brothers who-despite ahomeland at war and an ocean between them-hold fast to the bonds of family.
"Riveting...a resplendent love letter to an obliterated city."-The New York Times
"The Road from Raqqa had me gripped from the first page. I couldn't put it down."-Christy Lefteri, author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo
The Alkasem brothers, Riyad and Bashar, spend their childhood in Raqqa, the Syrian city that would later become the capital of ISIS. As a teenager in the 1908s, Riyad witnesses the devastating aftermath of the Hama massacre-an atrocity that the Hafez al-Assad regime commits upon its people. Wanting to expand his notion of government and justice, Riyad moves to the United States to study law, but his plans are derailed and he eventually falls in love with a Southern belle. They move to a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, where they raise two sons and where Riyad opens a restaurant, Cafe Rakka. But he finds himself confronted with the darker side of American freedoms- the hardscrabble life of a newly arrived immigrant, enduring bigotry, poverty, and loneliness. Bashar, meanwhile, stays in Syria. After his older brother moves to America, Bashar embarks on a brilliant legal career under the same corrupt Assad government that Riyad despises. Reluctant to abandon his comfortable (yet conflicted) life, he fails to perceive the threat of ISIS until it's nearly too late.
The Road from Raqqa is about America's fraught but hopeful relationship to its own immigrants, and the toll of dictatorship and war on everyday families. It's a book that captures all the desperation, tenacity, and hope that comes with the revelation that we can find home in one another when the lands of our ancestors fail us.
