The City Always Wins - Tapa dura

Omar Robert Hamilton's explosive debut novel [has] a combination of intensity and empathy rare in political fiction ... The view is admirably clear-sighted, evenhanded, at times kaleidoscopic ... A kind of revolutionary verisimilitude ... The writing really sings ... It powerfully transmits the hope and despair of Egypt's Tahrir Square generation [and] plunges us into an important moment in recent history and makes us think about it anew ... It may even grow to be an important book-one of the defining novels of the Arab Spring. (Toby Lichtig The Wall Street Journal)

An astonishing debut novel. The triumphs and disappointment of the 2011 Egyptian revolution - and the energy of the Cairo streets - brought vividly to life The City Always Wins is a tale of defeat and dashed dreams and of hope's persistence told in a poetic prose. The style is at once pared down and highly expressive. The tension between exuberance and restraint fits the subject matter and defines Hamilton's method. He splits scenes to great effect, interspersing text messages, tweets and real headlines, raising the pitch until the final stretch of Khalil's stream-of-consciousness. This private, continuous flow of thought at the end of the novel is an apt reflection of the retreat from collective, social energy to the individual and interior realm. The relentless acceleration of pace mimics the confusion of the events, the sense of the people - who once seemed to hold the reins - losing control. Here is the novel form proving itself again, revealing far more than journalism can. (Guardian - Book of the Day)

The Egyptian revolution of 2011, seen through the eyes of two young activists, is vividly brought to life in this moving chronicle of mortality. Cairo is the city evoked in this ambitious debut novel and it is seen from a prismatic range of perspectives, including those of Mariam and Khalil, two young activists whose lives are thrown into turmoil by the Arab spring. The couple work for a media collective that disseminates information about repression and revolution in a narrative spliced with tweets, Facebook posts and newspaper headlines, compellingly exploring the powers and pitfalls of communication. The author is also a film-maker and a cinematic style captures both brutality and beauty, from "the echo of bullets ricocheting through the air" to "the chorus of birds that fills the dusk air in Zamalek". The novel also travels into the hearts of the people who inhabit this city ("the unending city of sores and scars and needs that will never be sated") - in a moving chronicle of mortality, "the stain of a life slipping away" and the pain of losing loved ones. (Observer)

A poetic, intimate debut set in Cairo during the Arab Spring . A psychologically acute perspective on the uprising as it unfolded, positioning the reader alongside political dissidents ... Reads with a diary's intimacy ... Line by line Hamilton has the power of a crack poet ... This novel bears witness, recording injustice and aiming, as all good literature attempts, to tell the truth (New Statesman)

Rarely does a debut novel arrive as fully realised and confidently written as Omar Robert Hamilton's The City Always Wins. Sure-footed and pitch-perfect . Hamilton shares with the likes of Colum McCann and Jay Mclnerney a gift for providing for his drama a landscape which sizzles with life and heat and energy. This novel is more than a well-executed modern history lesson. It is a chronicle of injustice, betrayal and sadness. And it's much more satisfying for it. (Big Issue)

Remarkable . a rollercoaster emotional journey that Robert Hamilton, drawing on first-hand experience, captures with thrilling immediacy. (Mail on Sunday)

Early on in The City Always Wins, the debut novel by British-Egyptian film-maker Omar Robert Hamilton, there's a perfectly pitched sequence where a description of a revolutionary protest is entwined with the government's simultaneous attempt to smooth it out of history. At the Chaos office in Cairo, gas masks, food and juice are being organised for the injured, while the state-run television channel issues smooth denials that any significant violence has occurred. "And there is not an atom of truth to the malicious rumors of live ammunition," the newsreader says. "Do not believe unverified rumours. Do not rely on foreign-owned media for your information?.?.?.?Beware of troublemakers. Beware of infiltrators." This week, some real-world news stories made me think about the unreliability of the official record - and what might happen when that version of the truth becomes a foundation of people's memories. (Financial Times)

A powerful debut ... True to its documentary origins, The City Always Wins is a novel of many voices, allowing the parents of the dead their own monologues of grief ... Part of the strength of the novel is the way it pushes beyond the familiar tropes of war writing - whether on film or in fiction - questioning the politics of looking as as well as of recording, and acknowledging that there are moments when the camera simply has to be turned off. (Claire Armitstead Guardian)

Compelling . Hamilton is to be commended for his vivid and sensitive depiction of one of the most important events in recent world history... The novel's most salient feature, which resonates far beyond its geographical setting, is its portrayal of the revolution as a communications spectacle facilitated by social media. In the West political activism on Twitter can seem like a giant banter bus, of a piece with our democratic tradition of satirical dissent; in Egypt it was integral to direct action, the difference between a protest happening and not happening. Digital technology is ubiquitous in these pages: tweets, location pin drops, YouTube clips and Whats-App exchanges. Whether helping them to elude capture or drawing attention to arrests and abuse, the internet is the activists' most potent weapon against authoritarian repression. The brief, euphoric bubble of digital utopianism that followed the fall of Mubarak has long since been punctured. Likewise, liberal opinion on the merits of the Arab Spring has lapsed into an uncomfortable ambivalence. And yet The City Always Wins is decidedly optimistic. The insurrectionary spirit, depicted here in all its beautiful naivety - 'each rock in the air an invisible fate, an invigorating fatalism' - is every bit as timeless and at least as unstoppable as the realpolitik it is up against. (Literary Review)

There is no shirking the grim realities in this profoundly moving work, which opens in a morguem and is ultimately an elegy, not just for the loss of revolutionary hopes, but also youth and young love. (Belfast Telegraph)

Omar Robert Hamilton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer. He has written for the Guardian, the London Review of Books and Guernica. He co-founded the Mosireen media collective in Cairo and the Palestine Festival of Literature. This is his debut novel: www.orhamilton.com.