The Bullet Collection

Marianna watches her older sister Alaine collect the detritus of war from around Beirutbullets, shrapnel, grenades, a gas mask. These objects, some taken from dead bodies, catalogue Alaines retreat into a dangerous depression. As the family struggles to endure the daily violence of the Middle East conflict, it is Marianna who becomes her older sisters keeper, watching for any signal that might trigger one of Alaines frequent, grim excavations. But once the family escapes to America, Alaines newfound contentment is as alien to Marianna as her madness once was. As Marianna longs for her beloved, war-torn home, she struggles to understand that now she is the difficult sister.

In lyrical, dreamlike prose, Patricia Sarrafian Ward mines both the stunning, exotic landscape of Beirut and the pure, defiant landscape of a childs heart, and shows how war leaves its indelible scars on both.

In lyrical, dreamlike prose, Patricia Sarrafian Ward mines the stunning, exotic landscape of Beirut as well as the pure, defiant landscape of a childs heart. And The Bullet Collection shows readers how war leaves its indelible scars on both.

“With this debut novel, Ward emerges boldly from the ranks of Arab women writers and proves to be a writer to watch.”Library Journal

“[The Bullet Collection] shows stunningly, profoundly, the depth of the tragedy of Lebanon and offers, so slightly, the hope of salvation.”The Daily Star (Beirut)

“Passionate, lyrical, and deeply humane, this tale of two sisters caught in a war without end moves effortlessly through space and time, illuminating the private terrors of a dispossessed family and the public terrormore relevant than ever, nowarising from clashing cultures. This is an astonishing first novel.”Andrea Barrett

“A fine and memorable book about social pathology, Patricia Wards first novel encompasses both the destruction of Beirut and the more intimate life of a besieged family witnessing that conflict. It is both realistic and dreamlike, moving back and forth between childhood and adulthood, progressing in time and spiraling out of it, as its narrator describes and dramatizes the deadly attraction that warfare held for herself and her sister. In this novel, the war goes on out in the streets, but in these two it is also enacted privately, in the mind and on the body. The Bullet Collection has the unmistakable (and strangely lyrical) ring of truth about growing up under the most harrowing conditions.”Charles Baxter

“The Bullet Collection, as its name suggests, is about mortality, chance, and endurancethat part of us which proves retentive of wars horror and the memory of pain. Ward makes vivid the presence of the past; she writes with great authority and unyielding lyric precision about a family and nation torn apart.”Nicholas Delbanco

fs26“The Bullet Collection completes the string of novels inspired by the Lebanese civil war. A vivid proof on the impact of a war which robbed children of their identities and left them dazed and confused. A war which has erased their childhood completely except for deep scars on their tiny wrists bearing the witness of their rage, anger, and helplessness. Written in a poetic if not hypnotic proseethereal like a feather which pierces into the soul like a dagger.”Hanan al-Shaykh

“The Bullet Collection is a big, heartfelt, moving work, a loving exploration of loss and discovery.”Diana Abu-Jaber

Marianna watches her older sister Alaine collect the detritus of war from around Beirut—bullets, shrapnel, grenades, a gas mask. These objects, some taken from dead bodies, catalogue Alaines retreat into a dangerous depression. As the family struggles to endure the daily violence of the Middle East conflict, it is Marianna who becomes her older sisters keeper, watching for any signal that might trigger one of Alaines frequent, grim excavations. But once the family escapes to America, Alaines newfound contentment is as alien to Marianna as her madness once was. As Marianna longs for her beloved, war-torn home, she struggles to understand that now she is the difficult sister.

In lyrical, dreamlike prose, Patricia Sarrafian Ward mines both the stunning, exotic landscape of Beirut and the pure, defiant landscape of a childs heart, and shows how war leaves its indelible scars on both.