The Foghorn Echoes - by Danny Ramadan (Hardcover)

About the Book

A devastating novel about broken relationships, the promises we're unable to keep and living with the ghosts of your past

Book Synopsis

A deeply moving novel about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.

Hussam and Wassim are teenage boys living in Syria during America's 2003 invasion of Iraq. When a surprise discovery of their romantic relationship results in tragedy, their lives, and those of their families, are shattered. Wassim promises Hussam his protection, but ten years into the future, he has failed to keep his promise. Wassim is on the streets, seeking shelter from both the city and the civil war storming his country. Meanwhile Hussam, now on the other side of the world, remains haunted by his own ghosts, doing his utmost to drown them out with every vice imaginable.

Split between Vancouver and war-torn Damascus, The Foghorn Echoes is a tragic love story about coping with shared traumatic experience and devastating separation. As Hussam and Wassim come to terms with the past, they begin to realize the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.

Review Quotes

The Foghorn Echoes bristles. It burns bright . . . This novel is a tender and impassioned love story for a country, for a people, and for all those who refuse to disappear quietly into the land of the forgotten

The Foghorn Echoes is, fundamentally, an epic: the story of two men, two cities, and between them, love and a war-- "Guernica"

Contemporary, mystical, timeless . . . The Foghorn Echoes gives me a similar feeling to that which I had with The Kite Runner, of characters haunted by love and hunted by loss, across oceans, timelines and warzones. The story is so specific, yet it speaks of all love. When I finished The Foghorn Echoes, I felt that I had read a fiction which was unquestionably, undeniably true

Protest, civil war and refugee politics hum in the novel's background, but they are not its heartbeat. Instead, Ramadan focuses on love, loss and identity amidst the ruins-- "NB Magazine"

Powerful and compassionate-- "The Observer"

Seldom do we hear stories about members of Syria's queer community told with empathy and nuance, especially in the wake of its civil war. The Foghorn Echoes delivers in spades, but crucially, it's also much more than that and Danny Ramadan's prose is wonderful. This is a heartfelt, compelling tale that should be added on bookshelves everywhere

Hussam and Wassim will live on in your heart long after the last page. A story of a country torn apart by war and hearts broken by wars within

The Foghorn Echoes bristles. It burns bright. It shouts into the dark with a voice that hovers between a melody and a lamentation. Danny Ramadan writes in these pages with a spellbinding urgency, stripping bare some of the most painful and fundamental truths about displacement and grief, about rage and betrayal. In the process, he reminds us again and again that even the worst of memories contain redemptive powers. This novel is a tender and impassioned love story for a country, for a people, and for all those who refuse to disappear quietly into the land of the forgotten.--Maaza Mengiste

'Treat your thoughts like hurt children. They haven't learned yet how to handle pain'. So says a wise ghost in Danny Ramadan's sweeping and mesmerising story that spans time and mortal space so expertly and elegantly. This is a beautiful novel, written by a once hurt child and loved and deeply admired by another, me.--Alan Cumming

Praise for Danny Ramadan: There are moments and scenes of intense clarity and poignancy that will stop readers in their tracks-- "Irish Times"

The Foghorn Echoes is a deeply moving book about conflict both internal and external, the ways in which cold accidents-of birth, of place, of time-can leave a human being at war with their own desires, their own sense of self. Danny Ramadan is a gifted, sensitive excavator of the things that break people and put them back together, the past as weight and lightness. In this novel he has created a world of immense sensory and emotional precision, at once true in its living details and yet electric with the presence of ghosts.--OMAR EL AKKAD "author of What Strange Paradise and American War"

A complex portrait of placelessness-- "Times Literary Supplement"

A remarkable read. Danny Ramadan opens a world for his readers and guides them through it with sensitivity and suspense--BERNHARD SCHLINK "New York Times bestselling author of The Reader"

By turns sombre, fantastical, violent and tender, Ahmad Danny Ramadan's English-language debut is a gay son's conflicted love letter to Syria--Globe and Mail

Contemporary, mystical, timeless. . .The Foghorn Echoes gives me a similar feeling to that which I had with The Kite Runner, of characters haunted by love and hunted by loss, across oceans, timelines and warzones. The story is so specific, yet it speaks of all love. When I finished The Foghorn Echoes, I felt that I had read a fiction which was unquestionably, undeniably true.--LEMN SISSAY "author of My Name is Why and Gold from the Stone"

I've read many stories about love and war. Few have moved me this much. The Foghorn Echoes is marvellous: subtle but dramatic, tender but urgent, and beautifully written. I'll be thinking about it for a very long time.--DINA NAYERI "author of The Ungrateful Refugee"

Studded with the kind of graceful poetry that makes the most hardened heart soar like a silktail . . . Ramadan has gifted his readers with a resistance manifesto coded with love--DIRIYE OSMAN

About the Author

Danny Ramadan is an award-winning Syrian-Canadian author, public speaker, storyteller and LGBTQ-refugee activist. His debut novel The Clothesline Swing won the Independent Publisher Book Award for Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction, was shortlisted for the Evergreen Award and the Sunburst Award and was named as a finalist for the Gay Fiction Category in the Lambda Awards. He is also the author of a children's picture book, Salma the Syrian Chef. Danny also translated Raif Badawi's 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think and has published two collections of short stories in Arabic. He was awarded the StandOut Award for his social activism, the 2018 RBC's Top Immigrant in Canada award, and the Bonham Centre Award for Excellency. He lives in Vancouver with his husband.

@TheDannyRamadan dannyramadan.com