This is the book on the Middle East you have been waiting to read. [It] tells the story of the 2011 Arab Spring and its slide into autocracy and civil war better than I could ever imagine its being told. The volume is remarkably slender for one of such drama and scope - beautifully written . . . All great works of fiction are works of great philosophy, pondering the fundamentals of humanity. Few volumes of non-fiction ever achieve this, but Worth's does, touching essential human truths about the human condition . . . The writing is so beautiful and the storytelling so easy that you won't realize how much you are learning as you read. But there is no escaping the import of the stories. No way to read this marvellous book and not understand far more than you did before about this troubled region and the people struggling to find their way back to quiet lives New York Times Review of Books sakriti opis