About the Author

Suad Aldarra is a writer and data scientist based in Dublin. She was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to Syrian parents. In 2003 she moved back to her family home in Syria to study software engineering. After fleeing the war in 2012 she lived in Egypt and the US, before eventually settling in Ireland. In 2021, Suad was awarded the Art Councils of Ireland English Literature bursary. I Don't Want to Talk About Home is her debut memoir.

Reviews

Powerful, fascinating and deeply moving - this book pushes aside our lazy images of human migration and refugees. I loved it.
*Roddy Doyle, author of Love *

Full of heart, honesty and hard-learnt wisdom, I Don't Want To Talk About Home addresses complex issues about identity, belonging and family. This book took me on a captivating journey across continents, history and culture. Suad Aldarra possesses a rare gift to when it comes to storytelling; I literally couldn't put this book down.
*Jan Carson, author of The Raptures *

Illuminating, vivid, and insightful, this is such a timely book.
*Louise O'Neill, author of Idol *

This is a heart-wrenching memoir. Suad's courage, resilience and determination to find a place she can now call home, shines through. A beautiful book that I read in one sitting.
*Sinead Moriarty, author of Yours, Mine, Ours *

It is difficult to convey in a few words how much I loved this book. Full of heart-wrenching moments, it moved me to tears frequently, tears of both empathy and joy.
A beautiful evocation of a lost home and a lost homeland, tender, heartfelt, elegiac, full of humorous and wry observations that create a vivid picture of a vibrant world little known, understood, or appreciated in the west, it gives identity, humanity, and dignity to all those too often dismissed as faceless and nameless 'refugees' or 'migrants.'
*Arnold Thomas Fanning, author of Mind on Fire *