What a Lemon Tree Taught Me About the Life I Take for Granted
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh is a young adult historical fiction novel set during the Syrian civil war, following Salama, a pharmacy student turned wartime pharmacist in Syria. The novel portrays the daily reality of surviving under siege — the loss, the impossible choices, and the quiet endurance of hope.
There are things I have never had to think about.
Whether the building I'm in will still be standing by evening. Whether the person I spoke to this morning will be alive by nightfall. Whether wanting a future — just the simple, unremarkable act of planning one — is something I'm still allowed to do.
I have never had to think about any of this. And for most of my life, I didn't realise that not having to think about it was itself a kind of fortune.
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow made me think about it.
What This Book Is About
Set in Syria during the civil war, Zoulfa Katouh's debut novel follows Salama, a young pharmacy student who — almost overnight — becomes one of the few medical resources left for the people around her. The hospitals are overwhelmed. The shelves are emptying. And every day, ordinary people are trying to hold the shape of ordinary life together under the weight of extraordinary violence.
This is not a war novel about soldiers or strategy or politics. It is a war novel about a girl who wanted to become a pharmacist, who had a family, who had plans — and who now has to decide, every single day, whether to stay or to go.
What It Means to Survive Instead of Live
There is a line in this book that I keep returning to, not because it's the most dramatic, but because it quietly dismantled something in me:
"It doesn't hurt for you to think about your future. We don't have to stop living because we might die. Anyone might die at any given moment, anywhere in the world. We're not an exception. We just see death more regularly than they do."
I read that and had to put the book down.
Because the thing is — I do think about my future. Constantly, carelessly, without a second thought. I think about next month's plans and next year's travel and what I want to be doing five years from now. I have never once considered that thinking about the future might be a luxury. That for some people, the future is something they have to be given permission to believe in.
Living under siege, as Katouh portrays it, strips away everything we assume is simply part of being alive. The freedom to eat. The freedom to move. The freedom to speak without calculation. These aren't dramatic freedoms — they're quiet ones. The kind you only notice when they're gone. Reading Salama's story, I noticed them for the first time.
And then there is this:
"Might. What a word. It holds infinite possibilities of a life that could have been. So many options stacked one on top of the other, like cards waiting for a player to pick and choose."
That word — might — is one I use so easily. I might go here. I might try that. I might. For Salama, might means something heavier: the life she could have had, the choices that no longer exist, all the possible futures that the war has quietly foreclosed. She is surrounded by mights that will never become did.
The Heartbreak That Doesn't Announce Itself
I expected this book to be sad. I did not expect it to be sad in the way that it is.
It isn't loud about its grief. There are no long, theatrical breakdowns. The heartbreak accumulates slowly, in the gaps — in what characters don't say, in what they've stopped hoping for, in the small things they do just to feel human for a moment. That restraint is what makes it devastating.
What also hit me harder than I anticipated was the obstacle of leaving. I think, naively, I had assumed that if things became bad enough, people would simply go. But leaving a war-torn country is not a decision — it is a gauntlet. There are practical barriers, moral barriers, emotional ones. Leaving means abandoning. It means admitting that the place you love may never be what it was. And even when you choose to go, the leaving is its own kind of survival test.
Salama faces all of this. And in the middle of it, she holds onto something:
"I won't let them own my fears."
That line carries everything. It is not defiance for its own sake. It is the refusal to let violence reach the one place it hasn't yet touched — the interior of who she is.
Hope as Something You Tend
The lemon trees in the title are not incidental.
There is something deliberate about choosing that image — lemon trees that grow through rubble, that fruit in seasons indifferent to everything happening around them. Katouh uses them to say something about hope that I find more honest than most things written on the subject: hope is not a feeling that arrives. It is something you tend. Even when you're exhausted. Even when tending it feels absurd.
"It reminds me that as long as the lemon trees grow, hope will never die."
By the time you reach this line in the book, you understand why it matters. It isn't optimism. Optimism would feel insulting in a context like this. It is something quieter and harder — the choice to keep going not because things will definitely be okay, but because stopping isn't an option you're willing to take.
And somehow, against everything, the book earns its ending. Like the last quote I've held onto since finishing it:
"The most beautiful sunsets are always the ones that come after a rain."
What Fiction Does That the News Cannot
For most of the world, Syria exists as a headline. As a statistic — displacement numbers, death tolls, years of ongoing conflict. The kind of news that registers from a distance, absorbed with a kind of dull, helpless awareness. It lands. And then it doesn't.
This book landed.
That is what fiction can do that journalism, for all its importance, sometimes cannot — it gives you one person's face, one person's hands, one person's specific, irreplaceable interior life, and it asks you to stay with her. You can't skim a person the way you skim a headline.
I finished As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow thinking about how fortunate I am to live somewhere where war is something I read about rather than something I survive. I thought about all the ordinary freedoms I have never once named because they have always simply been there. And I thought about how easily the lemon trees can be uprooted — and how remarkable it is, each time, that anyone manages to keep them growing.
If you are looking for a novel that will make you feel something true, this is it.
Upcoming book by Zoulfa Katouh: The Ocean Would Paint Me Blue - I can’t wait to read. Pre-order here via Shopee
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