I Don'T Want To Talk About Home (The Rooney Prize For Irish

I Don't Want to Talk About Home (THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2024) Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it. RODDY DOYLE, author of Love THE BESTSELLING MEMOIR - SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS BIOGRAPHY OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2024 'I carry my troubled homeland within me; I hide it like a crime.' Growing up in conservative Saudi Arabia, Suad Aldarra felt stifled by the strictures placed on women. She yearned for the vibrant Syrian streets of her family's origin. When the opportunity arose to study at Damascus University, she jumped at the chance to move to a city she loved and to experience a degree of freedom she'd never known. But when the war started, everything changed. Suddenly Suad was thrown into a world of relentless pressure desperately looking for a way out. Her degree in software engineering was the saving grace that allowed her to travel to Ireland on a working visa. Yet reaching safety came at a price ... I Don't Want to Talk About Home is not a memoir about war and destruction. It's not about camps or boats. It's about the enduring love for a home that ceased to exist, building a life out of the rubble, and the parts of yourself you lose and find when integrating into a new world. Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book. LOUISE O'NEILL, author of Idol Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom... a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. I literally couldn't put this book down. JAN CARSON author of The Raptures Review: Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it. -- Roddy Doyle, author of Love Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom, I Don't Want To Talk About Home addresses complex issues about identity, belonging and family. This book took me on a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. Suad Aldarra possesses a rare gift to when it comes to storytelling; I literally couldn't put this book down. -- Jan Carson, author of The Raptures Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book. -- Louise O'Neill, author of Idol This is a heart-wrenching memoir. Suad's courage, resilience and determination to find a place she can now call home, shines through. A beautiful book that I read in one sitting. -- Sinead Moriarty, author of Yours, Mine, Ours It is difficult to convey in a few words how much I loved this book. Full of heart-wrenching moments, it moved me to tears frequently, tears of both empathy and joy. A beautiful evocation of a lost home and a lost homeland, tender, heartfelt, elegiac, full of humorous and wry observations that create a vivid picture of a vibrant world little known, understood, or appreciated in the west, it gives identity, humanity, and dignity to all those too often dismissed as faceless and nameless 'refugees' or 'migrants.' -- Arnold Thomas Fanning, author of Mind on Fire I Don't Want to Talk About Home is a singular and moving portrait of the chaotic times in which we're living. Suad provides a unique view into how, religion, family, and love mix together into a modern story of losing and finding home in a world torn apart by war and conflict. -- Chris Fabian, co-founder Giga, UNICEF Aldarra writes about being a fire starter and her voice is a bright new spark. An insightful and intimate personal testimony of resisting limits, whether imposed by borders or beliefs, illuminating how our roots and identities are myriad. -- Caelainn Hogan, author of Republic of Shame An excellent and ultimately hopeful memoir, essential for anyone seeking insight into the world of an unwilling migrant. * Geographical magazine * Will prompt readers to reflect that 'this could be me' and in doing so, to hopefully examine their own privilege, their attitudes to and assumptions about migrants. * Irish Independent * An instantly gripping memoir by a Syrian migrant in Ireland about displacement, suppressed trauma and, above all, love. * The Sunday Times Ireland * Author Biography: Suad Aldarra is a writer and data scientist based in Dublin. She was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents. In 2003 she moved back to her family home in Syria to study software engineering. After fleeing the war in 2012 she lived in Egypt and the US, before eventually settling in Ireland. In 2021, Suad was awarded the Art Councils of Ireland English Literature bursary. I Don't Want to Talk About Home is her debut memoir.