The Beirut Villa

Some people inherit a house. Toni Haddad inherited a war.

Born to a Houston debutante and a penniless Lebanese scholar who eloped after meeting on a boat to Spain, Toni Haddad grew up between glittering Texas society and a mountainside villa outside Beirut - a house her father bought from his best friend the same year the deadliest civil war of the twentieth century broke out around it. At fourteen, she was sent to live with relatives who couldn't wait to get rid of her: chaperoned by hashish-smoking cousins twice her age, held at gunpoint in a woodshed, catcalled for her blonde hair, beaten for smoking a cigarette in the street, she fell in love with Beirut anyway - and never fully recovered.

Years later, when peace finally seemed to hold, she moved into The Beirut Villa by herself: no phone, no running water, a Syrian Army checkpoint on the lawn, and an uncle who believed the house - and everything in it - belonged to him. What followed was a battle with family members and other characters over a name on a deed, over history, over a house that outlasted every ceasefire that was supposed to save it.

Spanning fifty years - from a hopeful 1966 "peace trip" through the 2020 Beirut port explosion to the bombs still falling as this book goes to print - The Beirut Villa is a memoir of a fierce woman that couldn't stop fighting, and about a country that couldn't stop breaking. Wickedly funny, unflinching, and told by someone who survived by refusing to look away, this is Beirut the way only a daughter of the house could tell it.