PAGE TURNER AWARD FINALIST
Meet Luke Larson, a British Egyptian doctor who struggles to be from two worlds at the same time. He's working in one of the world's most dangerous hospitals in Yemen. When rebel forces take over the city, a group of Western mercenaries take refuge inside the hospital and Luke and his team find themselves in the middle of a deadly clash. To make matters worse, leading the mercenaries is an unwelcome figure from Luke's past. After years saving the lives of others, Luke needs to face the demons of his past in order to save his own.
Set in the UK and Yemen, Guns and Almond Milk is a noir thriller that deals with identity, diversity and old coins of arguable value. It's The Sympathizer mixed with M.A.S.H by the way of Ramy.
"Brilliant noir debut of Mustafa Marwan both traditional and unheard of, and one worth celebrating darkly. Trust me when I say this book goes places you've never been."—Lee Durkee
Guns and Almond Milk is a fast-paced story of love, murder, and thrill that provides readers with a fresh perspective on humanitarian work, assimilation, and Middle Eastern politics.
PAGE TURNER AWARD FINALIST
Meet Luke Larson, a British Egyptian doctor who struggles to be from two worlds at the same time. He's working in one of the world's most dangerous hospitals in Yemen. When rebel forces take over the city, a group of Western mercenaries take refuge inside the hospital and Luke and his team find themselves in the middle of a deadly clash. To make matters worse, leading the mercenaries is an unwelcome figure from Luke's past. After years saving the lives of others, Luke needs to face the demons of his past in order to save his own.
Set in the UK and Yemen, Guns and Almond Milk is a noir thriller that deals with identity, diversity and old coins of arguable value. It's The Sympathizer mixed with M.A.S.H by the way of Ramy.
"Brilliant noir debut of Mustafa Marwan both traditional and unheard of, and one worth celebrating darkly. Trust me when I say this book goes places you've never been."—Lee Durkee
Guns and Almond Milk is a fast-paced story of love, murder, and thrill that provides readers with a fresh perspective on humanitarian work, assimilation, and Middle Eastern politics.
Present Day, Thursday, 10:13
The road snakes through caramel desert, from the rustic harbor to Aden’s only functioning hospital. The sun is yellow and white, shades of my headache.
Seatbelt-free, the driver pushes the three-ton 4x4 beast over 120 kph, challenging the second Land Cruiser with the rest of our medical team to keep up. Next to him is our welcoming committee: Yehia, a young Yemeni nurse with a fixer’s attitude. Michael, our team leader, clutches the grab handle above him and nervously peers at the speedometer. The driver glances at him in the rearview mirror and grins.
I’m gazing at the scattered sand outside my window when the car slows as it approaches a stone arch at the entrance to the city. A young, suntanned soldier is waving for us to stop.
He checks our papers as I take in the checkpoint’s walls studded with bullet holes like galaxies of black stars. Other soldiers are checking outgoing cars; one is smoking atop a pickup truck with a mounted heavy machine gun, while another is motionless behind a bulletproof barrier, waiting for the one moment in a million when his presence might be useful.
I inhale. The air is bitter, laced with diesel fumes and gunpowder. I wonder what the soldier behind the bulletproof barrier might be thinking of: home, money, love ...
“… Metallica!”
The first soldier is speaking to me.
“Excuse me?”
“You like Metallica? Music ... heavy metal?” He’s pointing at me as though I were covered in tats, singing “Nothing Else Matters” with a black electric guitar and a mane of hair that would do the eighties proud. Somehow, I feel closer to a lobotomized sloth.
I follow the trajectory of the soldier’s pointing finger. Duh. My Metallica T-shirt—the only clean one left after I packed two days ago in London. So much for my situational awareness. I’m tired after our long connections and the boat trip from Djibouti. My two morning oxycodone haven’t kicked in yet against the throbbing pain in my head and my fuzzy peripheral vision.
“Ah, yeah. Metallica. They’re cool,” I say, struggling to remember the last time I listened to them.
“Yes, the best! “Unforgiven” and “Devil’s Dance” ... Black Album rocks, man.”
“Indeed, indeed.” I nod sagely, with the wisdom of a Buddhist monk.
“So, you’re doctors, huh? Doctors who love Metallica.” He chuckles, pleased with his own wittiness.
Michael laughs more than the situation deserves. I purse my lips and shrug as if to say, “guilty as charged.” A small trail of cars is forming behind us. Good luck guessing the reason for the delay.
“You look Arab,” the soldier says.
“Yes, I’m originally from Egypt.”
He scrutinizes the name on my British passport: Luke Archer. “But your name is Western!”
I smile. “It’s a long story.”
He returns our passports and steps away from the window, a bit disappointed, probably assuming they’d lost another one to the other side. “OK, OK. You go now.”
Yehia tells the soldier that the next car is part of our convoy. He nods. Our white Land Cruiser stops about a hundred meters ahead, indicators flashing, waiting for its twin sister.
When the second car makes it through the checkpoint, we merge back onto the road. We haven’t yet picked up speed when the explosion hits.
The shockwave slams the seat against my back hard enough to empty my lungs. A deafening roar and a gust of hot wind, peppered with dust, envelops the car and rattles the windows.
I look back. The checkpoint is engulfed in a giant jellyfish cloud of gray smoke, drifting into the sky.
Michael whispers, almost inaudibly, “Sweet Jesus.”
The driver stops. He frowns at the flames devouring the checkpoint and the skeletons of the less-fortunate cars and shakes his head. Then puts the car back in gear and moves forward.
“Shouldn’t we … shouldn’t we go back?” I ask.
“We can’t go back,” Yehia says. “Those human bombs usually double tap. We’ll beat the injured to the hospital anyway.” He notices Michael’s paper-white face. “Don’t worry, suicide attacks are common these days. We call them appetizers.”
“I’m sure those soldiers no longer do,” I mutter.
Yehia catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. “Welcome to Yemen!”
There are few stories that I have felt are truly unbeatable, irreplaceable, unreplicable---but three of those stories involve war writing, medical subplots, dark humor, a certain amount of absurdity, and political subplots: namely, The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, and basically the entire M.A.S.H. TV series.
I now need to add Guns and Almond Milk by Mustafa Marwan to that list. Not only is it an incredible comparative title to what I've named above, but its qualities feel unreplicable, something that will stick to my mind like glue for months, and which will easily be among the top titles of 2024 for me.
Add to that the unique balancing act of Marwan's writing style: at one time beautifully prosaic and poetic, a literary fiction wonder, placed face-to-face with medical peril or sexual absurdity or dark noir elements. Marwan's writing doesn't stay rooted in dialogue, imagery, or rumination for too long, switching between the elements and moods of the story, and constantly keeping the reader on their toes, much like a medical unit in a dangerous war-torn environment would for their doctors.
Specifically, the story follows Luke Larson, a British Egyptian doctor who constantly feels torn between two worlds, two identities, needing to always be in two places at once. To top it all off, Luke is stationed in one of the most dangerous hospitals in Yemen during wartime, only for rebel forces to take over that city right after his arrival. When a group of Western mercenaries appear amidst the chaos and take refuge inside the hospital, Luke finds himself face-to-face with a dark figure from his past, forcing him to try to stay alive in the war and protect his patients from the demons (both psychological and physical) in their present and past, all while wrestling with the demons from his own.
Guns and Almond Milk is incredibly fast-paced and keeps you guessing, it's dark and yet funny (and even absurdly so at times; again, charmingly like Tim O'Brien), and it's wickedly and brilliantly funny. Marwan's intelligence and witts shine through every page of this story, with pages that turned faster than it felt like the eyes could read them, and what the reader is left with is an undeniably talented tome of duality, war, healing, love, and murder that refuses to be forgotten.