Dar Al Khayal publishing house recently released the “Apricot Plates,” a new novel by Syrian novelist Aziz Tebsi.
The novel opens pages from Syria’s history in the 1970s, when the domination of the security system was at its peak. It explores the life of a family at the time, from arrests to assassinations and clashes between the authority and opposition parties.
The story of the novel takes place between 1977 and 1979, amidst the intensification of political clashes that affected the fate of the Orfali family, which moved to Aleppo in the mid-19th century and benefitted from to the Ottoman bureaucracy.
The novel revolves around the history of this family, the real estate wealth it acquired, and the history of Aleppo and its modern neighborhoods formed in the early 20th century, in addition to the emergence of modern communism, ascension of Islamic military groups, and the decay of the ruling bureaucracy. According to the writer, this novel in a soft epitaph of a social class.
