Leave to Remain is Abbas El-Zein's award-winning memoir of his youth in Lebanon and his years of travel between the Arab and Western worlds. It's a clear-eyed and heartfelt examination of the forces that have shaped both his own life and much of ancient and recent history.First published in 2009, Leave to Remain won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards — Community Relations Commission Award in 2010.'An important book ... written in many tones – lyrical, sardonic, angry, heartbroken – but they are all in the key of Abbas El-Zein's compassionate love for war-ravaged Beirut, the city of his birth, childhood and early manhood.' — Raymond Gaita, philosopher and author of Romulus My Father'The best memoirs illuminate our intellectual blind spots. They leave us wiser and often less certain of our inalienable truths. So it is with Leave to Remain.' — Laurie Steed, ReadingsAbbas El-Zein has written for...

As civil war comes to Beirut, the lives of three teenagers—a student, a nurse, and a sniper—become intertwined in a city reduced to a battleground. Rules are made and remade, and everyone is at once victim and perpetrator, helping to keep their landscapes of violence alive.'As timely as today's headline, and as timeless as a Levantine love song, Abbas El-Zein draws on his own experience of Beirut's bitter war to create a novel that is elegant and elegiac. This writer has the rarest combination of gifts: a scientist's precision and a poet's eloquence.' — Geraldine Brooks, internationally bestselling, Pulitzer-prize-winning novelistAbbas El-Zein has written for numerous newspapers and literary journals including The New York Times, The Guardian, Meanjin, and HEAT Magazine. He is the author of the award-winning memoir Leave to Remain (2009), also in the Untapped Collection, and the short story collection The Secret Maker of...