Les échelles Du Levant by Maalouf

A lyrical travel-memoir tracing journeys around the eastern Mediterranean, where the narrator interweaves personal memories, historical reflection and portraits of ports and their inhabitants to meditate on identity, exile, the encounters and ruptures between East and West, and the gradual fading of the Levant’s pluralistic, cosmopolitan worlds. Intimate anecdotes alternate with broader cultural and historical observation, evoking nostalgia for vanished milieus while probing questions of belonging and memory.