The expression 'looks like Beirut' is a phrase that has become shorthand for anything chaotic - from a teenager's bedroom to littered streets. For debut novelist Mischa Hiller, it means a very different reality.
The Cambridge-based author moved to the Lebanon with his parents as a 10-year-old in the early '70s. He spent the next decade in the country as it became ravaged by civil war and the tinderbox tensions over Palestinian claims for statehood.
Hiller's novel Sabra Zoo describes the terror-filled weeks leading up to the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in September 1982.
The fictionalised account follows 18-year-old Ivan, an interpreter at the Sabra refugee camp hospital who spends his days drinking, smoking, flirting, desperately trying to lose his virginity and carrying out package drops for the PLO.
So why chose now to address what happened then? "I think you need distance from events to be able to treat them objectively or look at them dispassionately," says the author.
"The events of the Middle East still have resonance today. They form part of the history of the people living there. For that reason there are events that people in the West should also be aware of."
Hiller was born in Hull in 1962 to a Palestinian father and English mother. A peripatetic youth saw him grow up in Durham, London, Beirut and Dar Es Salaam. He was living in Beirut when the Sabra massacre happened and saw the aftermath, which he says has affected him greatly. The lsraeli Defence Force, who surrounded Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps, allowed the Lebanese Forces militia to enter two of these camps, Sabra and Shatila, where they slaughtered thousands of people. An estimated 3,500 people were murdered.
However, Hiller claims he never set out to become a political author, and insists that his novel is more of a love story. "Ivan has certain naive ideas about being able to get together with Eli [an older volunteer medic], but obviously that's unlikely to happen because she is already involved with someone else," he explains.
"Some of the characters are based on real people, by which I mean that there were people there doing those sorts of things. The people in the book are not those people, though.
"I am in Ivan only in the sense that I used to be 18 and I know what it's like to be that age and wanting things that you've never had before- pursuing women and all the rest of it are the concerns of any 18-year-old. I tapped into my own youth, but other than that he's his own person."
