Summary

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Shadid, also author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner Night Draws Near, was among four New York Times reporters captured in Libya last spring and held for six days by forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi. After being released, Shadid returned to an estate built by his great-grandfather in Lebanon that he had been working for two years to restore. His stay there led to this meditation on past and present, former Middle East grandeur and his family's flight from Lebanon and resettlement in Oklahoma, current violence in the region, and the profound need for home. A memoir in which the personal meets the political-and Shadid has already demonstrated what he can deliver.

---

"Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I've read." - Philip Caputo, Washington Post

In the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family's ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather's once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.

So begins the story of a battle-scarred home and a journalist's wounded spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this bittersweet and resonant memoir, Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house's renewal alongside the history of his family's flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America around the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, he memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into a shifting Middle East. This paperback edition includes an afterword by the journalist Nada Bakri, Anthony Shadid's wife, reflecting on his legacy.

"A poignant dedication to family, to home, and to history . . . Breathtaking." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Entertaining, informative, and deeply moving . . . House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it." - Telegraph (London)