My Country

On 21 August 2013, Kassem Eid nearly died in a sarin gas attack in the town of Moadamiya. At least 1,500 people were killed. Later that day he was hit by a mortar while helping the Free Syrian Army fight government forces. He survived that too. But the devastation wrought on his friends, his neighbours and his home transformed them into something unrecognisable, horrifying.

Born to Palestinian immigrants, Kassem Eid remembers moving to Moadamiya in 1989, at the age of three. The streets where he and his eleven siblings played were fragrant with jasmine. But he soon realised that he was treated differently at school because of his family's resistance to the brutal regime. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father in 2000, hopes that he would ease its severity were swiftly crushed.

Breathtakingly powerful, this brave, deeply felt memoir illuminates the realities of growing up in a corrupt dictatorship; the strictures of living under siege for a year; the impact of unspeakable violence; and how Kassem Eid rallied worldwide support through a highly-publicised hunger strike to break the siege of cities across Syria. It is a searing account of oppression, war, survival and escape - and an eloquent howl against the destruction of a nation as the world turned its face away.