Rubble: A Novel - Softcover

Assi, Seraj

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798887441948

Verlag: PM Press, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In a world scarred by indiscriminate bombing, forced starvation, and mass displacement, a nameless survivor lies crushed beneath the rubble of a bombing—alive, but barely.

Entombed in darkness with no hope of rescue, he must navigate the thin edge between life and death using only his hearing, sense of smell, and the volatile power of his imagination. Above him a genocide unfolds. Below, in his fragile pocket of air, he begins to witness it in ways no unburied survivor ever could.

As hours blur into days, hallucination and reality weave together. Memories seep through the cracks. Fantastical visions rise from the dust. In this liminal state, he gains a strange, heightened clarity, an almost supernatural insight known only to those suspended between worlds, the mortally wounded who hover in the space where time fractures and the mind sharpens to a blade.

What begins as desperate escapism becomes a haunting chronicle of a people forced underground by violence, a nation living beneath the weight of another’s cruelty. In the darkness, he discovers a grim sanctuary: the rubble is a tomb but also a refuge from the firestorm above.

A wartime tale of resilience amid annihilation, Seraj Assi's debut novel plunges readers into the intimate terror of one man’s confinement and the collective suffering of his shattered homeland. As he reflects, “Being under the rubble is a strange thing. . . . You’re clinging to life not to live, but to defy death. Just because you’re breathing doesn’t mean you’re alive. You’re a ghost, and your homeland is but a ghostland.”

This is the story of a people driven underground not by myth or choice, but by force: “We are subterranean only because others refuse to allow us our place under the sun.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in exile in Washington, DC. This is his debut novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Some moments are not to go unremembered. I’m speaking of the immense joy of pulling a child survivor from the rubble.

Amid the blaring chaos, a rescuer bursts into happy tears when he discovers that his own child, long missing under the rubble, is alive, visibly in tatters, but breathing still. The man is a doctor; surely he could stitch his baby back together, should he have the heart to do so.

I brace myself. Perhaps my time will come. Soon my grave will be discovered, and I shall exit into the light. But I’m in no special hurry. Children come first, remember? At least my body is still largely intact. I’m still in one piece, mainly. I must’ve lost a tooth or two. Perhaps more. I still have feeling in my hands and legs, though I can barely move, or bang on the walls, let alone walk. My nose is likely broken, but I can still smell, which is a curse, when you ponder it. My eyes are undamaged, mainly, but what the hell, I can’t see anything anyway.

*

Some moments thrust you into a state of emotional limbo, undecided on whether to weep or smile. You hear a child, weeping quietly beside his mother’s lifeless body. He seems not to understand what death is. Perhaps he thinks she’s sleeping. For when a stranger offers him a piece of fruit and lends a comforting hand, he stops crying. I remember a boy, a newly orphaned boy, hovering over a heap of lifeless bodies, gazing down into the waiting crater, weeping, wondering what colossal force had snatched his loved ones away. The house itself was gone, razed to the very foundation, with nothing left but a scar. Like a dandelion blown bare by a passing wind.

I remember my mother in the throes of grief. When my young brother drowned in the deep blue sea, I broke the bad news to her, and witnessed the first stirrings of horror on her face, a blank horror no words can express. I remember her, sitting beside his lifeless body, weeping and stroking his hair, her face white as a corpse, her eyes bleeding colorless pain. My brother drowned chasing a fish, not for sport, but because he was hungry. Never trust the calm sea.

Haunted by those memories, I cling tighter into my fetal position, as if reveling in the protective dark aura of my grave. In my hopeless desperation, I let loose a hysterical laugh, a tragic cackle by which I hope to convey my utter contempt and horror for all things human. I laugh so hard I almost forget to breathe.

*

There is a wedding nearby, being held amid the ruins. I can hear the ululations, the sound of rice scattering on the silent rocks. I can smell the incense that would usher the happy couple into marriage. Happiness still sprouts here, like wide weeds through the rocks. Sometimes the ululations grow so wild you wonder if it is a wedding or martyrdom.

It’s madness. A mother loses her son; she ululates, prays to Heaven, and thanks God for the gift of martyrdom. These scenes of native resilience, known among the natives as steadfastness, have baffled outsiders and confirmed their worst prejudices: It appears that the more indifferent to death we are, the less human we seem to outsiders. Our besiegers say that believing in Heaven is a dangerous notion, because it makes us fearless in the face of death, renders us a nation of martyrs. But we believe in what we believe in.

Ululations burst out again as a man long presumed dead miraculously emerges from the rubble, noticeably diminished, but alive still, to judge from the rumors buzzing overhead. He stands there weeping, hopelessly pleading with his mystified children to recognize him.

His survival lifts my spirits and fills me with sudden joy. I would ululate if I could! I even manage a smile as the man continues to plead with the children. I remember one day I came home from school and waiting for me was a strange bearded man with thick, grizzled hair and a slight frame. Oblivious to my bewilderment, he approached me with outstretched arms, and I ran out screaming.

It was my father, home from exile.

*

Heaven has proven more generous than the earth thereunder, and for all the miracles unfolding, few survivors have turned up.

Pulling someone from the rubble is an intricate operation, for you need to dig with manual tools, like axes and crowbars, and communicate with survivors who can hardly breathe. It’s a race against time and nature. Every second matters, for the voices underneath fade and vanish rapidly, like a dying echo.

Sad tales abound. A father finds himself buried under rubble together with his son; he embraces the child in a tight squeeze to protect him, little knowing that the child is dead. Nobody dares to tell him when they are found, knowing that hope alone is keeping him alive.

Sometimes, the rescuers themselves break down and collapse from emotional exhaustion. Laboring under relentless bombardment, rescuers often wait for days, sometimes weeks, before they pull the bodies from the rubble, and not quite intactly.

I wonder how long I’ve been buried underground. Time moves slowly here. I’ve lost my sense of it, hanging here with no hope of rescue, marooned in this timeless twilight with no light in sight. It could be daytime, or nightfall. I’m not sure. Time no longer exists. Or, it exists, but only as a mute harbinger of the death lurking ahead, ready to gnaw away at my stranded body with its inevitable toll.

Sometimes there is no telling dawn from sunset. But for the red blood, the place is a monochrome of dust and rubble. You feel like you are existing in a dystopian world, a ghostland, a modern city of the dead.

*

I hear a grinding sound crawling on the surface. I gather it’s the sound of a bulldozer loading bodies into waiting craters. No tombs, no funerals, no eulogies. Thanks to the bombs, the craters need not be dug. They lie there waiting for the dead, like the deep abysses of Hell. Oh, the heartless crawlers! You can hear the monsters crawl over the surface, picking up the lifeless bodies with their bloody forked teeth. The mere sound of those treads makes your skin crawl!

And as you wait there quivering, a blast rumbles, boom, and you hear a house tumble, like a sunken ship being swallowed up. As if the earth had split and sucked it in. Even the dust left in its wake is astonishingly audible. People gather. They stand gazing down into the chasm like hovering spirits, shaking their heads in great bewilderment, swearing by the seven heavens that moments ago there was a house full of people standing in what’s now emptiness.

I feel a great void in my heart, a rot in my soul. Numb with pain, my body is like an empty house, a deep dark hole, a crater. I can feel the worms of the earth vying for my remains like little vampires.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798887441948
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 160
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar