While working in the ancient Silk Road city of Aleppo, American Hannah Johnson and her Swedish lover, Oskar, are drawn into the mounting turbulence of the impending Syrian civil war.
After Oskar is wounded at a street protest one evening, he and Hannah cross paths with Dr. Samir Hasan, a renowned surgeon. As the protests swell into all-out war, Dr. Hasan tends not only to Oskar, but also risks his life, his practice, and his family to tend to a nephew the government has branded an insurgent.
Dr. Hasan’s humanitarian activities come to the attention of a vengeful, Javert-like secret police officer whose son’s death on Dr. Hasan’s watch triggers a series of events that will drag Hannah and Oskar deeper into the war and put Hannah and Dr. Hasan in the officer’s crosshairs.
Both intimate and sweeping in scope, The Doctor of Aleppo lends insight into how the most brutal, devastating war of the twenty-first century is mirrored on the personal scale, leaving scars that can never be healed.
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“This is not an easy book to pick up, but it is a harder one to put down. Told in short, often gruesome chapters, Mayland forces us to look at the torture, the death, the inhumanity of the war, all the while giving us characters we care about and ones we don’t like but curiously come to understand. I highly recommend this book, and I thank Mayland and his publisher for finally making me pay attention.”
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Midwest Book Review