The Burden of Certainty: The Ordeal of Questioning and the Desire of Imagination
The novel The Burden of Certainty: The Ordeal of Questioning and the Desire of Imagination was published by "Soual" in Beirut at the end of 2016. It consists of 380 medium-sized pages. The author dedicated his first novel to the Belgian city of Ostend, where he resides.
In 327 pages of medium size "Open Illusions Party" by the Kurdish-Syrian writer and poet Hosheng Ossi was published by Soual Publishing in Beirut, Lebanon. It is the second novel that is published by the house. His first one, “The Weight of Certainty… The Quandary of Question and the Lust of Imagination” was published in 2016, and won the Katara Prize for Arabic Novel in 2017, in the category of published novels.
"Open Illusions Party "
Its events unfold in a detention center for undocumented migrants on the Greek island of Chios during the summer and autumn of 2009. One of the detainees disappears under mysterious circumstances, prompting prison authorities to open an investigation. A week later, his body is discovered brutally murdered in the courtyard of a church near the prison. The victim had introduced himself to the Greek authorities as an Afghan refugee. The investigation thus shifts from searching for a missing person to uncovering his true identity, as a gateway to understanding the circumstances of his murder and the motives, causes, and hidden backgrounds behind it.
The Afghanian: Restless Skies
As If I Had Never Been
The novel revolves around the life of a visual artist living in Damascus, entirely detached from politics, the revolution, and everything that has unfolded in Syria. He devotes himself wholly to his art and is immersed in preparing an exhibition composed of twelve murals inspired by twelve short poems written by his maternal grandfather. He completes eleven paintings, but the twelfth remains unfinished after he is suddenly struck by blindness.
On behalf of the unknown.. Speaking of the tongue of disaster
In 2020, the world awakens to news of the outbreak of an extremely rare disease in a small country. The disease is known as Ambras Syndrome, or what is commonly referred to as werewolf syndrome, in which hair grows with extraordinary density over the human body, without being accompanied by rabies or bloodlust, as portrayed in horror films and novels. It is merely a hormonal disorder—yet it afflicts an entire population.
Passive Voice: A Full Stop at the Beginning of the Line
The novel is set in a retirement home in the Belgian city of Ostend (Oostende), unfolding through the recollections of several residents who recount fragments of their memories. The narrative spans multiple places, cultures, and characters, while its timelines intertwine from the period preceding the First World War up to the year 2019.
Among the locations featured in the novel are Belgium, Iraq, Vietnam, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Congo, Algeria, Lebanon, and Syria. In this novel, Hoshank Ossi seeks to embed his imagined fictional characters within real historical events that took place in these countries, lending them a layer of speculative, virtual fictionalization. By way of example, a Belgian journalist conducts an imagined interview with the Iraqi leader Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Kurdish leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani.