In Praise of Hatred, By Khaled Khalifa

Banned on publication in Syria, Khalifa's third novel - longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 - is set not in present-day Aleppo but in the decade following 1970 when the Muslim Brotherhood became locked in battle with the state's Baathist party.

The conflict - reminiscient in its terror of today's troubles in Syria - ended in 1982, when an attempted uprising was brutally crushed.

Radically, the novel, translated by Leri Price, profiles the psychology of fanaticism from a female perspective.