Ghassan’s family escaped Gaza and are living in Yarmouk, a refugee camp in Syria during Bashar al-Assad’s reign. When we first meet him at age seven he is an intelligent, outgoing boy, talented football player and hopelessly smitten with his schoolmate, Sama. Sama is bright, confident and dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

Ghassan lives in a cramped, concrete flat with his mother, Salsabeel, and father, Shokri. His personal family history is a mosaic of lies, betrayals, loss, violence and desperation. All is slowly revealed as we travel with Ghassan from childhood to adulthood.

Sama and Ghassan attend school with their friend Badawi. He is the opposite of Ghassan: swarthy, monosyllabic, envious and attracted to Sama. Ghassan’s daily life is a battlefield as the young boy attempts to understand the nods, winks and silences of adults with many faces. Yarmouk has many factions, many covert political plans and lust-driven violent fantasies.

Ghassan finds sanctuary at The Black Garage and realises that he has a talent for repairing car engines. He devotes himself to his work and dreams of spending his life with Sama. As the Arab Spring moves through Syria, Ghassan is rounded up and imprisoned in the hellish Sednaya prison.

Morsi is a confident writer and his novel is composed of short sentences and four parts. It is interwoven with passages of magic realism: white pigeons with hair and black pigeons fighting the universal good versus evil battle. The Hair of the Pidgeon is a haunting and challenging novel that examines the nature of love and identity in a world that is swamped with hatred.

Reviewed by Susan Gorgioski

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Author, Journalist and photographer Mohammed Massoud Morsi was born in Copenhagen in 1975 and promptly started a roving lifestyle, moving to Egypt with his Egyptian parents, then back to Denmark to further his schooling. He was drawn to writing from an early age and found his calling in places far beyond the news fronts, and into human wastelands.

Morsi spent almost two decades as a freelance journalist and photographer immersed in communities with forgotten people and conflicts around the world. He primarily worked for NGOs and published feature articles in Danish newspapers. Along the way, he also held a wide variety of jobs (airline programmer, forklift driver, fisherman, etc.) and expressed an entrepreneurial flair establishing a photographic academy in Copenhagen, building a school in a Phnom Penh slum, growing herbs guerrilla style and farming rabbits in Egypt.

Morsi’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Australian and international publications. He has authored three novels and five non-fiction books. His latest book The Palace of Angels was short-listed for the 2020 NSW Premiers Literary Award. He lived in Europe, Africa and Asia before taking up residence in Australia in 2011. Now a citizen, he continues his writing and lives in Perth with his son, Zaki.

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