Jabbour Douaihy's The American Quarter is set in the Mediterranean port city of Tripoli, on the northern coast of Lebanon. Unfolding at the height of the US-led invasion of Iraq, it revolves around the radicalization of an ordinary youth named Ismail and his struggle to decide whether to carry out an assigned deadly mission. But the evolution of Ismail's decision is part of a larger story entailing his father Bilal, a massacre survivor; his young disabled brother, whom Ismail looks after; his spirited mother Intisar, a maid like her mother before her in the wealthy, powerful Azzam household; and Abdelkarim, the Azzam family s only son, addicted to poetry and opera, and pining for his lost Serbian ballerina all candidly depicted by Douaihy with touching irony, warmth, and humor. As well, Ismail's crisis is entwined with the disappointments and meager prospects of those around him in the deteriorating enclave of stairways known as the American Quarter, and of others like him forced to crisscross the neighboring conflict-scarred lands.Ismail's reckoning with his mission somehow comes to reflect our own struggles--for redemption, for faith in life in the face of destructive forces that can erase in an instant what is dear to us. A suspenseful classic, in a superb translation by Paula Haydar, The American Quarter is a powerful, compassionate work of surprising beauty. A love letter in homage to the spirit of an old city of one's childhood and her people, it bolsters us with a gifted writer's long view of the threats to tolerance and trust we now face.