I Dont Want to Talk About Home, Suad Aldarra
I Dont Want to Talk About Home, Suad Aldarra
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I Don't Want to Talk About Home
A migrant’s search for belonging

Author: Suad Aldarra

Narrator: Nadia Albina

Unabridged: 9 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/14/2022

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

'I carry my troubled homeland within me; I hide it like a crime.'

Growing up in deeply conservative Saudi Arabia, Suad Aldarra felt stifled. The daughter of Syrian parents, she railed against the extreme strictures placed on women in Saudi society at the time and the rising prejudice her family faced as migrants. When the opportunity arose to study software engineering at Damascus University, she jumped at the chance to move to the city she loved for a degree of freedom she'd never known.

But when the war started, everything changed. Suddenly Suad and her new husband Housam were thrown into a world of relentless pressure and fled to post-Arab Spring Egypt. Suad's degree in engineering was the saving grace that allowed her to travel to Ireland on a working visa. Yet reaching safety came at a price...

I Don't Want to Talk About Home is not a memoir about war and destruction. It's not about camps or boats. It's about the enduring love for a home that ceased to exist and how to build a life out of the rubble.

With great warmth and insight, Suad writes about those left behind paper borders, the sacrifices made, and the parts of yourself you lose and find when integrating into a new world.

Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it. - RODDY DOYLE author of Love

Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom... a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. I literally couldn't put this book down. - JAN CARSON author of The Raptures

© Suad Aldarra 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Reviews

Goodreads review by Sue on August 18, 2022

This is a stunning book. Read it for its sheer sense of humanity. Read it because it will open your eyes. Read it and then find your own way to make a difference.......more

Goodreads review by Veronica on August 20, 2022

I had never read something written by a stranger that resonated so much with my personal experience as an immigrant ❤️......more

Goodreads review by Sab on December 07, 2023

I picked this up because I get a specific family-flavoured melancholy around this time of year and the title spoke to me. After reading the blurb, I just knew this was gonna hit me hard. Suad captures that longing for a place that only exists in memories so well and interlaces it with the complicate......more

Goodreads review by Sharmila on July 13, 2022

3.75 rounded up to 4 stars. “I Don’t Want to Talk About Home” is a debut memoir that follows Suad Aldarra. From her conservative upbringing in Saudi Arabia, her studies in her family’s homeland of Syria, the war, Egypt and eventually her work in Ireland and New York. I had really mixed feelings read......more

Goodreads review by Hannah on August 22, 2025

listened to the audio book whilst driving to work over a few days and was struggling to hold back the tears - beautiful book beautifully written......more

Quotes

Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it.

Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom, I Don't Want To Talk About Home addresses complex issues about identity, belonging and family. This book took me on a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. Suad Aldarra possesses a rare gift to when it comes to storytelling; I literally couldn't put this book down.

Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book.

This is a heart-wrenching memoir. Suad's courage, resilience and determination to find a place she can now call home, shines through. A beautiful book that I read in one sitting.

It is difficult to convey in a few words how much I loved this book. Full of heart-wrenching moments, it moved me to tears frequently, tears of both empathy and joy.
A beautiful evocation of a lost home and a lost homeland, tender, heartfelt, elegiac, full of humorous and wry observations that create a vivid picture of a vibrant world little known, understood, or appreciated in the west, it gives identity, humanity, and dignity to all those too often dismissed as faceless and nameless 'refugees' or 'migrants.'

I Don't Want to Talk About Home is a singular and moving portrait of the chaotic times in which we're living. Suad provides a unique view into how, religion, family, and love mix together into a modern story of losing and finding home in a world torn apart by war and conflict.

Aldarra writes about being a fire starter and her voice is a bright new spark. An insightful and intimate personal testimony of resisting limits, whether imposed by borders or beliefs, illuminating how our roots and identities are myriad.

An excellent and ultimately hopeful memoir, essential for anyone seeking insight into the world of an unwilling migrant. Geographical magazine

Will prompt readers to reflect that 'this could be me' and in doing so, to hopefully examine their own privilege, their attitudes to and assumptions about migrants. Irish Independent

An instantly gripping memoir by a Syrian migrant in Ireland about displacement, suppressed trauma and, above all, love. The Sunday Times Ireland

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