# The Book Club: Anand Gopal – Days of Love and Rage

An episode of [Best of the Spectator](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/793236670), 15 Sep 2026, 31 min.

Audio: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/68358fb5e1abc4be6b0308eb/e/6aaa702d7f8a8df433979863/media.mp3?tk=eyJ0ayI6ImRlZmF1bHQiLCJhZHMiOnRydWUsInNwb25zIjp0cnVlLCJzdGF0dXMiOiJwdWJsaWMifQ==&sig=NdmwEyBXRt65pjSGI301PJwPvMhGpVApaL4nlCgPhso

In this week's Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The New Yorker writer Anand Gopal, whose new book, long-listed for the Baillie Gifford Prize, is Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Revolution. What does freedom mean once the dictator has gone? Anand explains why he spent eight years reporting on Manbij, a city of 150,000 that pushed out the Assad regime and set about building a democracy from scratch – and how the argument over what came next split the revolution in two. They discuss the bubblegum seller who became a protest leader, the police chief who quietly stopped shooting at the crowds, how six outsiders talked their way into control of the city, and why the manuscript was handed in three days before Assad fell. Produced by Henry Lloyd Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shows are listed from Apple Podcasts' charts and directory, and Podcast Index where it is used. Every show and episode belongs to its publisher and plays from the publisher's own feed; this site hosts none of them.