Author Rana Hanna, photo by Michael Papaeracleous
Following successful launches in London and Nicosia, Lebanese Author Rana Hanna officially released her debut novel, Birds in the Rain (Bold Story Press), in Beirut during an intimate event held at Syma, L’Atelier de Porcelaine in Achrafieh.
Guests were invited to reflect on themes of love, hope, memory, and the courage to return home in a conversation between Rana Hanna and Syma Debbane, moderated by Layla Makdisi, followed by a Q&A and book reading.
The launch brought together readers, members of the literary community, journalists, and cultural figures for an evening that echoed the atmosphere of the novel itself, attentive, searching, and rooted in shared experience.
Birds in the Rain is a resonant literary work exploring how love and memory persist in times of conflict and how people live with what history leaves behind. Set during the 2006 Lebanese-Israeli war, the novel follows Layla as she searches for her missing sixteen-year-old son on the brink of yet another national crisis. Alongside Marc, an ex-militia man confronting his own past, she is pulled into a journey that tests the limits of grief and loss, hope and resilience, belonging and survival.
With emotional precision and narrative restraint, Birds in the Rain captures the quiet tension many Lebanese people carry inside themselves between home and exile, war and recovery, certainty and change. The characters live between places and histories, in that liminal space between here and there.
The book asks what stays with us after war stops making the headlines. “I wanted to capture how ordinary people rebuild after extraordinary loss, how love can survive even when certainty cannot,” says Hanna. She adds that the began with a personal question: how can we continue to live without those we love most?
A former journalist and editor, Hanna brings to fiction the insight of someone who has witnessed both conflict and renewal. The result is both a gripping story and a meditation on endurance, speaking to readers who have navigated dislocation in any form.
Birds in the Rain is available in paperback and eBook formats through major online retailers and at Librarie Antoine and Virgin Megastore.
About the Author
Rana Hanna is a Lebanese author and educational consultant living between Beirut and London. Educated at the University of Nottingham and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, she has worked in journalism and consulting. Her writing explores memory, identity, and the quiet spaces between belonging and distance. Birds in the Rain is her first novel.
Book Details
Title: Birds in the Rain
Author: Rana Hanna
Publisher: Bold Story Press
Publication Date: August 5, 2025
Size: 300 pages
Price: $20
Format: Paperback / eBook
ISBNs: 978-1-954805-74-3 (Paperback) | 978-1-954805-75-0 (eBook)