As happy as mice

A survivor returns from the hell of Syrian prisons. A Hezbollah fighter survives the pager explosion. A Palestinian tries to offer the children of Shatila a future…

Through some twenty portraits of Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Druze, Syrians, Jews, and Palestinians living in Lebanon, Fouad Khoury-Helou recounts the daily lives of men and women facing war, exile, and collapse—the lives of human beings who inhabit this country and share its fate.

But this book is also his own story—that of his family and the years of war he lived through in Beirut. From the port explosion to Lebanon’s economic collapse, from the urgency to leave to the desire to stay, from fear for his children to the instinct for survival, he describes what it means to carry on living when everything could change in an instant.

All these stories are based on real events. Beyond geopolitics and images of war, they reveal what crises usually leave out of the picture: men and women who love, suffer, work, joke, raise their children, and continue, amid the chaos, to seek happiness.

They all eventually come up against the same paradox: How can you be happy when everything is falling apart around you? How can you keep on living when drones are constantly circling overhead?

How can you be happy like rats? But happy nonetheless?

A specialist in the Middle East and the Arab world, Fouad Khoury-Helou has devoted his work for several years to the political, economic, and social upheavals in the region. He is the author of Lebanon: A State of Survival (Max Milo, 2025), The Collapse of the Arab-Islamic World (Hermann, 2018), Globalization: The Death of a Utopia (Calmann-Lévy, 2017), and America and the Middle East: The Middle East Held Hostage by International Interests (Hermann, 2015).