Kim Ghattas has not only drawn the big picture of how those events shaped the region but offers timely and thought-provoking insights into their continuing destructive influence. The weaponisation of sectarianism, women’s rights, the frustrated hopes of the Arab spring, the rise of Al-Qaida and Islamic State are all richly contextualised and illustrated.

...[a] sweeping and authoritative history.

The book is packed with accounts of ambition, treachery and cruelty—with a wealth of historical detail down to the hour of the day.

Kim Ghattas’s book shows, however, that similarity can be as dangerous as difference. Discussing the involvement of the Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, she notes that his ‘ways were also the ways of the Islamic Republic, hunting down its dissidents everywhere, imprisoning and torturing women, instilling fear in its neighbours’. Ghattas, a Lebanese-born reporter for the BBC and the Financial Times, also presents a series of more admirable individuals, such as the Iranian scientist and revolutionary Mostafa Chamran, who lived in Lebanon for a number of years among a Shi’a community ‘in harmony with their Sunni and Christian neighbours’, until those powerful factions started radicalising sectarian differences for political gain.

Black Wave is a cri de coeur, an action-packed modern history written with the pace of a detective thriller. It is also a post-Arab-Spring follow-up to the question posed by Bernard Lewis, the British-American historian of Islam, in his landmark 2002 book What Went Wrong? The answers, then as now, offer little encouragement.

Well-researched and elegantly written, Black Wave...is particularly strong and vivid at the start, where the author describes the Lebanon of the 1970s, a haven for revolutionaries from around the world and from where some of the Iranian guerrillas would emerge who would play a key role in the toppling of the Shah. Ghattas’s book is a colourful account of their lives, interspersed with lines of poetry and the songs of the divas who defined the sound of that era.

... an ambitious retelling of the past four decades in the greater Middle East.

Unlike narratives told from a Western point of view, this book doesn’t highlight terrorism or ISIS but instead seamlessly weaves history and personal narrative into a story that explains the gradual suppression of intellectualism and the creep of authoritarianism in the region, while highlighting those who have tried to fight against it.

...a fascinating and winding but highly readable tale.

Illuminating account of the origins of sectarian violence and the current political shape of the Muslim world.