The Clothesline Swing

A multi award-winning tale of love and courage, picked by the Independent as one of the 30 Best New Debut Novels of 2019

Inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, Ahmad Danny Ramadan’s innovative and poetic debut novel tells the story of two lovers anchored to the memory of a dying Syria. One is Hakawati, the storyteller, keeping life in forward motion by relaying remembered fables and incidents from their youth to his dying partner. Each night he spins stories of a Damascus childhood, of leaving home, of persecution and hardship, and of his fated meeting with his lover. Meanwhile, Death himself, in his dark cloak, shares the house with the two men, eavesdropping on their secrets as he awaits their final undoing.

A remarkable read. Danny Ramadan opens a world for his readers and guides them through it with sensitivity and suspense. Bernhard Schlink, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Reader

The Clothesline Swing is studded with the kind of graceful poetry that makes the most hardened heart soar like a silktail . . Ramadan has gifted his readers with a resistance manifesto coded with love. Diriye Osman, 2014 Polari Prize Winner

By turns sombre, fantastical, violent and tender, Ahmad Danny Ramadan's English-language debut is a gay son's conflicted love letter to Syria . . . Globe and Mail

The sweetest kisses are the ones we share in forbidden places. The kiss I stole from you in the back of a dark cab roaming Damascus, while the driver was cursing at checkpoints and wars; the time I pulled you back into the changing room at the H&M in Beirut and printed my lips upon yours; the ones you have me as we hid in the depth of tall grass on Vancouver's Wreck Beach.