All She Lost

‘Poignant and compelling… will resonate with anyone who cares about justice and the abuse of power’ - Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News International Editor and author of Sandstorm

'Essential and urgent' - Kim Ghattas, journalist and author of Black Wave

All She Lost by Dalal Mawad explores the crisis in Lebanon and the wider Middle East through a series of searing interviews with women in Lebanon, weaving an extraordinary story of survival, corruption, and impunity.

Dalal Mawad begins with a huge explosion in the heart of Beirut that killed hundreds of people – an apocalypse of a sequence of events leading to Lebanon’s unprecedented collapse. As an award-winning journalist in Lebanon when the blast occurred, Mawad was among the first to report on the mysterious and devastating explosion.

During her reporting, she discovered that it is the women who remain behind, and through their stories, the history of the Middle East must be reconstructed. She set out to record the untold stories of women long discriminated against.

Mawad's interviews include mothers who lost their children, spouses who lost partners, and refugee women fleeing the war in Syria. Among them is a Lebanese grandmother, bankrupted by the nation’s collapse, who recalls Beirut’s glory days of the 1960s, when celebrities like Brigitte Bardot and Miles Davis visited.

The book also shares the experiences of women like Mawad herself, who have left their homes behind. These women all experienced the explosion and suffered unimaginable loss and tragedy, yet are united by more than just this one event.

Their personal stories converge to tell the story of a nation whose glory days are long gone, plagued by protracted violence, lurching from crisis to crisis, and fighting to survive. All She Lost tells not only of what these women have lost but also what Lebanon and a part of the Middle East have lost, capturing a world that is no more.