A Word for Love

Praise

“Robbins’ melodic novel is story of war, family, language, but above all, a paean to unabashed, unbridled love. Told in quiet but elegant prose, each thump of this melodic novel’s heart (and what an enormous, rousing heart it is) attests to the timeless and life-giving power of love.”  –Khaled Hosseini, New York Times-bestselling author of The Kite Runner 

“A stunning first novel on love, loss and language.” –The Chicago Tribune

“A beautifully crafted story…Her poetic style plunges the reader into the scene, her tone reminiscent of Camus…A Word for Love made this reader cry from feeling the transformative, redemptive power of fiction. This profoundly satisfying novel ventures to the very heart of romance and its literary origins in the seventh-century lyric poetry of the Arabian desert.” –Washington Independent Review of Books
 
“Emily Robbins has written a lyrical story about love in nearly all of its manifestations.” –New York Journal of Books
 
“[An] extraordinary debut.” —Bustle

“Deeply affecting … Here, Syria is more than a war-torn nation—it’s a site of longing, love, and intellectual rigor.” —Hazlitt 

“The shiny gold cover and title caught my eye, but I stayed for the premise. A college student travels to the Middle East to study a famed text of doomed love. Her fascination with language may be what drew her to the country, but it’s the political turmoil and the people she meets that really serves to educate her.” –BookRiot 

“With lyrical precision and sharp psychology, A Word for Love asks us to consider the ways one household might become a world, one love might become a universe.” –Rebecca Makkai, author of Music for Wartime

“Transforms the most impossibly tangled and de-humanizing aspects of the world we live in now into prose so clear and clean you could drink it.” –Kathryn Davis, author of Duplex and The Thin Place

“A Word for Love artfully tells a human story while keeping a mounting conflagration (in Syria and elsewhere) constantly in its frame.  Subtle, lapidary, powerful, the novel beautifully evokes the quiet of rooms and the turbulence outside, showing how an innocent evolves into a witness, and how much it costs her, and how much more it costs those she comes to love.”  –Zachary Lazar, author of Sway

“Bea is a winning choice as a narrator, lending the story vulnerability and authenticity, especially because she is such an empathetic, and often helpless, spectator. With an impressive economy of words, Robbins, formerly a Fulbright Fellow in Syria, tells a story that proves that themes of love, loss, and freedom truly can transcend borders and time.” –Booklist (starred review)

“Robbins weaves a story complete with exquisite sentences, including descriptions of the Syrian landscape . . .Bea’s fascination with language and the unique characteristics of Arabic add delightful layers to the text. This is a rich, understated novel that offers an absorbing story full of longing, political intrigue, and the beauty found outside the familiar.” –Publishers Weekly

“This debut serves as a meditation on the many meanings and forms of love, and how words and texts can be used both to love and to harm.” –Library Journal

“A lyrical, bittersweet story that raises more questions than it answers, Robbins’s debut explores the gaps in translation (both linguistic and cultural), the problems of divided loyalties, and many words for love . . .a luminous, bittersweet novel.” –Shelf Awareness