Taking shape through the memories of a nameless narrator, his desperate, moving search for friends and family lost in the war-stricken ruins of Beirut,Unreal City describes the sufferings of the Shia and Palestinian communities against the harsh backdrop of the civil war in Lebanon. In contrast with the rich luxuriance of the narrator's childhood, spent in the Lebanon mountains, Beirut has become a landscape bereft of signs, populated by corpses and strangers, haunted by "faces" stolen by "war and time": "It had become a city where nobody could know if they had been forgotten". In this "city of memory", the narrator constructs a landscape for himself--one peopled by friends "lost and forgotten"--on which he maps out his life of waste and denial. It's a map which locates a past and present unhinged, broken, by love and war. His return to that city--both imaginary and real, in memory and in hope--will offer him the chance of redemption from the ideologies and censors of Hizbollah. For "those who cannot tell if they have been remembered must exist a little less", lost to the future and to the world. --David Marriott