As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow

In Homs, Syria, pharmacy student Salama Kassab spends her days working in a makeshift hospital, treating the wounded and dying of a war that has already killed her parents and left her caring for her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla. Every voice around her, including a hallucinated companion born of her trauma, urges her to take the dangerous, expensive route out of the country while she still can. Then she meets Kenan, a young man documenting the revolution on camera, and staying suddenly feels like it might be worth the risk.

Zoulfa Katouh, herself Syrian, grounds the novel in the granular, exhausting reality of life inside a city under siege: the triage decisions, the disappearing medical supplies, the constant calculus of who can still be saved. Salama's choice is never simple heroism versus cowardice, but an honest reckoning with what it costs to stay and fight for a home that keeps taking everyone she loves.

As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow is a YA novel about survival, first love, and moral courage inside an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe, written to put a human face on the Syrian civil war for readers who have only known it as a headline.