Ali, a self-denigrating Catholic and unruly homosexual who immigrated to Berlin almost a decade ago from southern Lebanon, stands accused of assaulting a police officer during a Palestine solidarity demonstration. Caught in a suspended present as he faces possible deportation from Germany, Ali prepares to bid his goodbyes to a city in ebullition. The many people in his life pierce through the dense fog of days: Francesco, an Italian ex-boyfriend afflicted with the malady of hope; Samira, his tenacious confidante and the bearer of her Syrian community’s burdens; and, somewhere far away, his father Karim, who took arms with the communists against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. There are also the Germans, and the beast that slumbers in them—who knows what it remains capable of. Carried by tragic humor and political reckoning, Fear Eats Ali is a forthright novel about the time and place of resistance, the debt one carries in its wake, and the helplessness of men in the face of immense historical transformations “Edwin Nasr has written a great war novel—sharp, intelligent, probing—that draws us into the exhausting venality of German Staatsräson and into a complex and evocative world of transnational solidarity and anti-colonial struggle centred in and around Lebanon and Palestine. What does it mean to fight and fail and start again? This is the crucial question Nasr’s book engages, a book for our historical moment, a book which needs to be read.” - Avery F. Gordon, Professor Emerita University of California Santa Barbara and author of The Hawthorn Archive (2017) and Ghostly Matters (1997/2008)
