It’s like another world is inhabiting the city – they have no control over what happens to them because the BIG events of the war are all around them, but from this point of view it feels as if the war is also such a minor part of their lives, like the weather. Strange that we’re so close to the “action” and yet this action is not what we’d assume, it’s people holding hands in the dark and saving a potted lemon tree.

Again, past, present and future are one, “and so in these several ways these three people sharing this one apartment splashed and intersected with each other across varied and multiple streams of time”. This has been the current all through the novel, a current of time, but the three aspects of time, all of which are interchangeable and relative.

The homeless dead – there’s nowhere for anyone to go.

The ‘and’ used to describe how Saeed’s father thought of his wife as his best friend is perhaps the most beautiful and sad ‘and’ I’ve ever read. “and his wife had been his best friend” because it defines why he was devastated and what their relationship had been without having to add extra detail. This is profoundly beautifully written novel.

Amazing (heartbreaking) writing to describe her death all in one sentence, as if all of life (and death) is coming at them too fast to even take a breath and also how memory works when we link two distinct events together because of a tragedy. It also speaks to how life goes on while other die, that life is both precious and cheap, that we will be remembered in the same way we remember an apartment we once lived in.