India, June 5 -- Ali from Where The Wind Calls Home is the strangest character I have encountered in a while. What accounts for this peculiarity is the magical world in Ali's head which constitutes of his spiritual relationship with the elements of nature. Even after the chaos of war takes over his poor family - his older brother is killed and he is forcibly enlisted in the army - his private world sustains him right to the end. It is the death of that world that the reader has to grieve alongside the brutalities wrecked by the civil war in Syria.

The novel translated by Leri Price opens with the 19-year-old Ali gravely injured in a misfire on a remote Latakia mountain. Covered in debris and disoriented, he zones in and out of consciousn...