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Jan 11, 2018tirjan rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
From Amazon: Editorial Reviews Review “Omar Hamilton brings vividly to life the failed revolution of 2011 on the streets of Cairo, in all its youthful bravery and naive utopianism.” ―J. M. Coetzee “Fucking incredible, and this is without hyperbole. Hamilton has created both an unsparing psychological portrait of a generation―a generation that could just about see a new world through the tear gas―and a poetic, searing depiction of a revolution betrayed.” ―Molly Crabapple “I finished The City Always Wins with fascination and admiration. It gives a picture of the inside of a popular movement that we all saw from the outside, in countless news broadcasts and foreign-correspondent reports, a picture so vivid and powerful that it gives a passionate life and reality to what might have been perceived only as abstract principles. A thousand vivid details imprint themselves on the reader’s memory: it will be a long time before we read anything so skillfully brought to life.” ―Philip Pullman “Few writers could capture the frenetic speed of an internet-fueled uprising alongside the time-stopping corporeal reality of bullet-ridden bodies, all while never losing sight of the love that powered Egypt’s revolutionary moment. Omar Robert Hamilton can do all that and more. Crossing borders and generations, he brings us into the movement’s effervescent hope and its crushing heartbreak, probing timeless questions about what the living owe to the dead. Unbearable. Unmissable. A dazzling debut.” ―Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything “From the chaos and torment of a revolution and the perpetual struggle with despotism, Omar Robert Hamilton has drawn a novel of great emotional and intellectual power. The City Always Wins is a rare fiction that reminds us, with its wisdom about violence and inequality, grief and loss, how politics is for many today a way to live―and die.” ―Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger “The hope, the excitement, the arrogance, the disillusionment, the renewal of hope―this novel is fast, thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.” ―Roddy Doyle "Explosive . . . The City Always Wins powerfully transmits the hope and despair of Egypt’s Tahrir Square generation, and the bravery and willingness of its members to keep fighting in the face of insurmountable obstacles. Mr. Hamilton plunges us into an important moment in recent history and makes us think about it anew. While the novel’s political message is clear, its tone is never hectoring, and its journalistic attention to detail never didactic . . . one of the defining novels of the Arab Spring." ―Toby Lichtig, Wall Street Journal