A man writes a letter to his lover. But it is not a love letter - it is a letter about the man's feelings and past; about his hopes and his inner demons. And the further you read into this letter, the less you like the man - he is possessive and controlling; he seems to have expectations of his lover which would not apply to him. The letter is never finished and a lot of the passages in the letter remain unfinished. It reads more like a diary than like a letter and yet, it has a recipient and the recipient is often talked to in the text.

That's how this novel opens. But the novel is not the story of this man and the woman who he writes to. The letter never reaches her - instead we read a letter by the person who found and read that first letter. The second writer comments on the letter they found, explains how they found it and then tells a story of their own. And then 3 more people find the letter of the previous writer and write their own.

The 5 writers are all different. They write to different people - an old crush, a father, a mother, a brother. The stories they tell are different but they all are stories of longing to belong and of exile or immigration; they all talk about lost connections and the loss of their families and homes. I am not sure if it was a byproduct of the lack of gender in English but it takes awhile to figure out the gender of the writer in some of the letters. The author tries to keep the voices different but they all merge a bit, becoming an almost unified voice of the people who got lost in the world. And yet, there is some difference under it all - because the crimes and stories people confess to are different; the hardship they lived through had marked them. One of the writers was tortured and then became what he hated the most; one of them escaped a forced marriage; one of them was thrown out for what he was. The letters tell their stories the way they see them - how their own consciousness allows them to see the story. We only see the end of the story for one of those writers; the others remain open for now.

If the novel contained only these 5 letters, it would still be an interesting read - albeit an incomplete one. The author seemed to agree so these letters are just the first part of the novel. The second part revisits the same stories but from the other side - in some cases we see the recipient and their thoughts about the writer; in some cases we see someone who the writer talked about and way the writer influenced their life. Almost all of the stories get their resolutions - combine the respective sections of the two parts of the novel and you get an almost complete story. As is usually the case, the complete story is very different from the one side you see when you read the letters in the first part and it makes you wonder what the actual truth is - after all the second part is the viewpoint of another participant and not of a narrator who can see all sides.

And then there is the 5th letter, the last one in this chain of letters, the one which noone finds. Its story continuation in the second part does not resolve its story, neither we really learn a lot of new things because of how that part is structured. So how do we learn about it then? That's what the third part of the novel ties together - with a sixth letter - the only one to be written without a real recipient (or is the reader the recipient?) and by a man who is not away from home (or not too far away anyway). It ties the novel together and works almost as a summary of the whole novel - even though it does not really mention the fifth letter, the end of the story of that letter is there.

The country where everyone comes from and the countries they are in when they write their letters are never named. One of the letter-writers believes that the previous one in the chain was from Lebanon and some of the clues point in that direction as well - the author is also from Lebanon so even if invented, the country was probably based on Lebanon. But the country is never really named; neither is any of the character named. As much as the characters are individuals and come alive at the page of the novel, they are also "the lost" - the nameless and the country-less. And at the end it does not matter - their stories work without names and without locations - all you need to know that it is an Arab country which was at least partially taken over by Daesh - being invented or a real one is irrelevant for the stories.

Some of the letters contain very graphic description of torture - some of it named with its proper name, some if it not. It makes these section hard to read and while at the start the novel mostly hints at these, the later letters openly discusses them. They made sense - the writers were writing their own stories and having lived through the horrors, they had become somewhat used to thinking about them (and it is not surprising that the person who was the most graphic was also the one who had inflicted enough horrors on other people).

It is a novel about losing everything - family, country, yourself. And while its structure can be a bit scattered and the novel may be losing its coherence as a whole in places, it still works. Its original name translates as "Night mail" and I suspect that it carries connotations which I am not aware of and cannot recognize. Its English title is apt and tells you exactly what you get in the short novel. So even if I usually do not like creative translations of titles, I think that here it works better than the original one.

I don't think that the novel will work for everyone and the narrative style takes awhile to get used to (plus a lot of the letter writers are not people you would want to hang out with) but if you can get immersed into the story and you are not too bothered by the graphic language, it is a gem of a novel - an imperfect one but still worth reading. ( )

De flaptekst zegt dat dit boek op indringende wijze de ontheemding van de moderne mens toont. Hoewel enigszins overdreven is deze typering niet slecht gekozen. De schrijfster geeft de ontheemding weer in een aantal brieven, niet altijd verzonden. De brieven haken op een kunstige manier in elkaar. Daardoor ontstaat naast een aantal parallelle verhalen ook een stuk verbonden emotie en zie je sommige dingen van 2 kanten. Door de verbinding met het vliegveld krijg je inderdaad het gevoel van een ontheemding. ( )