Gosia Krakowska

Censored forever by a Russian translator Mikhail Kachenovsky, the Ackerman Steppe was- according to historians- written by Polish exiled rebels, noble women perhaps, who following their forceful exile in Crimea, were allowed to leave and settled in the Lutsk county (today western Ukraine).

Your guide into a sublime and extraordinary sex life as well as intellectual sexual experience wrapped in a beautiful and sensual narratives.

The book introduces a female narrator- a young, intellectual representative of Damascene bourgeoisie- who is about to expose her abortion, as traumatic as the abrupt socio-political changes of the 1963 coup d'etat she is the witness of. Because the book is written in a form of a diary, everything read is very personal as well as affective; it is written in Samman's style.

This is the first work by Samman I read, still as a teenager, that left a profound impact on my writing style, and the ability to analyse psychological portraits of the characters the reader learns about as he/she explores the book. Trapped in the besieged Lebanese capital, a young female intellectual- Ghada ad Asamman herself- battles the impact of the day-to-day terror by revealing her war trauma in a series of oneiric, disturbing narratives, of her dreams, her nightmares.