The Clutter of Love

About this book

The hardest human pains are not those that pierce the body but those that sneak into the heart in secret, wound it, and leave behind a void haunted by the ghost of separation. This is the bond that wrapped around Barakat's neck, the young emigrant who tried hard to abandon his old name and his miserable life to become "Salim," believing that estrangement would erase his past's curse and close his most painful box of memories. But loneliness was not merely distance from family; it was "an emptiness of feelings, a deprivation of tenderness, and a frost of embraces" that inhabited his fleeing soul. He chose Berlin as a home, not in search of wealth but fleeing a world that had rebelled against him since his birth, and out of a hidden longing to meet his lost beloved Salma, who had moved there with her husband. Five years of effort and perseverance were not enough to calm the storm inside him. Suddenly, fate places him face to face with Adel, Salma's husband, to strike a fateful business deal with him. That encounter was no passing coincidence; it was a key to Barakat's black box, which he had tried over and over to forget. A moving novel about immigration, lost love, and the price of a new identity.