The Foghorn Echoes (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
The Foghorn Echoes is uniquely structured so readers can feel the past echoing through the lives of Hussam, who emigrates as a refugee to Canada, and Wassim, who stays in war-torn Syria, just as one can hear the echoes of a scream in the distance. Throughout chapters that alternate in perspective, Ramadan highlights the different ways one traumatic event impacts the lives of two individuals. Equal parts love story, ghost story, and meditation on the impossibility of outrunning one’s past this is one you won’t want to miss
— From DavidHussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America's 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.
Split between war-torn Damascus and Vancouver, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realise the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.