There is a large placard on a stand describing the pieces. Naj makes more small talk, then excuses herself. Against each wall there are boxed displays with a photograph above each one. “ After an orgasm,” the woman adds, and everyone laughs. There’s a large sign near each wall admonishing do not touch.

It reminds her of black-tar heroin, which she saw once in London when she and Jo went out with a group of teenage fans.

The surface is shiny and Naj finds herself drawn to it, mesmerized. The walls are painted a deep, outer-space black. It is a large, open venue that Naj has seen before, but it’s been completely transformed. The art gallery is lit like a haunted house, with lamps blooming from unlikely corners. This scene shows Naj at an art gallery in Beirut, and it was so fun to daydream and brainstorm about what sort of project would be on display artists working out of Beirut are producing some of the most incredible visual art, music and literature of my generation. But those that love that city (and country) know it to be brimming with contradictions and capable of holding multiple, at times painful realities and truths. It is a place that is often fragmented in the imagination: either exotified or fretted over, a place condensed into devastating headlines. Naj was one of my favorite characters to write because she allowed me to inhabit Beirut again and, more precisely, Beirut in all her complexity. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, where she works as a clinical psychologist. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, and elsewhere. Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize. The following is excerpted from Hala Alyan’s latest novel The Arsonists' City, about the legacy of war in the Middle East and how we hold on to the people and places we call home.

The Arsonists' City by Hala Alyan