Local authors Deborah Campbell and Kevin Patterson launch their new books at ArtSpring.

Deborah Campbell’s A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War is the riveting true story of a remarkable relationship between two women–the award-winning Canadian journalist Campbell and Ahlam, an Iraqi woman working as a “fixer” for Western media in Syria as it plunges into war. The book reveals as much about the universal power of friendship as about the courage of those who bring us our daily news. Campbell has reported from Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, the UAE, Qatar, Cuba, Mexico and Russia. Her work, much of which involves spending long periods of time in the societies she covers, has appeared in Harper’s, The Economist, New Scientist, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Walrus and other publications. She is the author of This Heated Place, a journey into the Israel-Palestine conflict, and teaches at UBC.
Kevin Patterson, the award-winning author of The Water in Between and Consumption launches the definitive novel of the Afghanistan war. News from the Red Desert begins in late 2001, when everyone believes the war is already won and the Taliban defeated, then leaps late in the severely escalated conflict–into the mess, and death, and confusion. At its heart are the men and women who have come to Afghanistan to seek purpose, and adventure, and danger, by engaging in the most bewitching and treacherous of human pursuits: making war. Patterson grew up in Manitoba, and put himself through medical school by joining the Canadian army. Now a specialist in internal medicine, he practices in the Arctic and on the coast of BC. His first book, The Water In Between, was a New York Times Notable Book. Country of Cold, his debut short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2003, as well as the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize.
Sponsored by SS Books, SS Library, and Penguin Random House Canada.