House of Stone | Granta

  • Published: 07/03/2013
  • ISBN: 9781847087362
  • 129x20mm
  • 336 pages

House of Stone

Anthony Shadid

In spring 2011, Anthony Shadid was one of four New York Times reporters captured in Libya, cuffed and beaten, as that country was seized by revolution. When he was freed, he went home. Not to Boston or Beirut where he lived or to Oklahoma City, where his Lebanese-American family had settled. Instead, he returned to his great-grandfather’s estate in Lebanon, a house that, over three years earlier, Shadid had begun to rebuild. House of Stone is the story of a battle-scarred home and a war correspondent’s jostled spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house’s renewal alongside his family’s flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America. He memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into this volatile landscape. House of Stone is an unforgettable meditation on war, exile, rebirth and the universal yearning for home.

Six pages into this book, I said to myself, if Shadid continues like this, this book will be a classic. And page by page, he did continue

Dave Eggers, author, Zeitoun

There is not space here to set out all of this book's many rewards... The prose is ripe, the biblical landscapes vividly rendered... Profound, insightful, tragic and funny... House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it

Ed Loughlin, Daily Telegraph

The insights into life in war-ravaged southern Lebanon make for a powerful read, at once a personal memoir and a sweeping regional analysis

Josh Glancey, Sunday Times

The Author

Anthony Shadid was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and former Baghdad bureau chief of the Washington Post. Over a fifteen-year career, he reported from most countries in the Middle East. He won his first Pulitzer Prize in 2004 in International Reporting for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the occupation which followed. He won a second in 2010 for his coverage of Iraq as the United States began its withdrawal. Shadid is the author of two previous books, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats and the New Politics of Islam (2001), and Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War (2005), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. Shadid died of an asthma attack while attempting to leave Syria on horseback on 16 February 2012.

More about the author →

Anthony Shadid on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

What Silence Knows

Anthony Shadid

‘Words can’t quite re-create the smell of war. I have found myself trying to wash it out of my hair, off my fingers. More than once, I have run water over the soles of my shoes.’

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Home: Reflections for Anthony Shadid

Various Contributors

‘I realize it is my fault: whenever I live in any country, everything turns wrong. I see it as a gift.’

In Conversation | The Online Edition

Anthony Shadid | Interview

Anthony Shadid & Ted Hodgkinson

‘It’s very difficult to say what kind of Iraq is going to emerge from this trauma. I think we have to wait a generation.’