CHICAGO: Award-winning author Faysal Khartash’s “Roundabout of Death” is set in Aleppo at the height of the Syrian civil war. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @arabnews.lifestyle The story follows Jumaa Abd Al-Jaleel, a schoolteacher, husband, father, and resident of the war-torn city. As the conflict begins in 2012 and gathers support through 2016, bloody battles, ceaseless bombardment, and indiscriminate violence that creates several thousand displaced people and refugees, transform the country and its landscape. But Al-Jaleel and his family stay, and with electricity that comes and goes as often as people live and die, he navigates life in a place where survival comes at a cost. Living through war in a city divided into east and west, high school teacher Al-Jaleel frequents a cafe in Saadallah al-Jabiri Square to meet friends and watch the daily chaos unfold. Drowning in fear as fighter jets fly overhead, drones buzz, and residents move between streets of blackened and burned houses, Al-Jaleel changes physically and mentally. Two bumps start to grow on his forehead, and he finds it increasingly difficult to visit his mother who lives on the other side of the city. Khartash emphasizes the transformation as Al-Jaleel moves between first-person and third-person narrative, at times disassociating himself from his actions. According to translator Max Weiss, Al-Jaleel experiences war phrenology which is “the somatic experience of wartime pathology that results in an impaired ability to comprehend the present as well as a persistent dread of an unpredictable future.” By 2016, the war had devastated Aleppo, where only 200,000 civilians remained compared to the 2 million in 2012. Khartash’s characters convey the stories of the vibrant history of the city amid the contemporary conflict that causes families to flee and separate, and what the men, women, and children must do to survive, even Al-Jaleel’s own, living life through uncertain circumstances. There are details down to the brick of a building in Khartash’s Aleppo as it is torn apart and its people displaced. And not only Aleppo, as the novel moves through Damascus, Homs, and Raqqa, cities Al-Jaleel had happy memories of. Through the trauma and violence, the residents of the country come together to force their own survival, feeding one another, providing shelter in abandoned buildings and in each other’s homes, and refusing to allow the government to end their stories.