How can one adequately praise this book? Its modest tone, narrating the elegies, disappointments, and wistful joys of existence cannot withhold the unique power of Charara's sensibility. Accepting us as companions on his journey of growth and healing, he reveals his regard for all creatures, humans and pets, as it refines the dimensions of his own heart. Profundity emerges organically, culled from and delivered in the inflections of daily life. Among his unflinching views of family, the poet's indelible poems to his mother and the confrontation of lost love retrieve both the wisdom of closure and the truth that some griefs can be transformed, not lessened. The Sadness of Others will not leave the hearth of one's consciousness.

 –D.H. Melhem

The Sadness of Others gives us understated, unflinching snapshots of what's finally real about life's changes–going from one home to another, one marriage to another, the moment you discover you forgive someone, and the deprivation you'll never quite mourn: motherlessness. Too damn young to write this well, Hayan Charara uses all his technique to achieve one end: breaking the reader's heart. 

–Diana Goetsch