Crumbling Ottoman outposts, doomed pashas, and roving bandits feel immediate, familiar, and relevant. “I was captivated, instantly, by Anthony Shadid’s lushly evocative prose. My blurb (and I wrote it myself, and meant every word): It's only the third book I've ever agreed to blurb.

House of Stone is an unforgettable meditation on war, exile, rebirth, and the universal yearning for home.

In the process, Shadid memorializes a lost world, documents the shifting Middle East, and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape. In this poignant and resonant memoir, the author of the award-winning Night Draws Near creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent’s jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather’s estate, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild. Not to Boston or Beirut-where he lives- or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled and where he was raised. In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. “In rebuilding his family home in southern Lebanon, Shadid commits an extraordinarily generous act of restoration for his wounded land, and for us all.” - Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the agonies and hopes of the Middle East.” - Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of Crossing Mandelbaum Gate “Evocative and beautifully written, House of Stone.

House of stone shadid