War has been a regular horror in Lebanon for nearly half a century, flaring most recently this fall with Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in attacks against the Iranian-backed paramilitary group Hezbollah, a spillover in turn from the brutal, ongoing Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza. Earlier this week, President Biden announced that a ceasefire had been reached to end 13 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

It was in 1975 that Lebanon, which had largely escaped the violence engulfing Israel and its Arab neighbors in four separate conflicts between 1948 and 1973, became torn apart by sectarian fighting — a civil war that by 1990 would leave an estimated 150,000 people dead and prompt another one million to flee the country.

It was a confusing conflict that, very broadly, pitted Lebanese Christian militias and forces against a loose coalition of Palestinans, Lebanese Muslims, and left-wing Lebanese Christians. But economic and political inequality, as well as splinter groups and opposing factions within the same sides, deepened the chaos, eventually drawing other nations and U.N. peacekeeping forces into the conflict.

It’s against that backdrop that Thérèse Soukar Chehade has set her new novel, “We Walked On,” an impressionistic story that presents a ground-level view of how war impacts people in all its confusion, terror, and destruction, particularly how fear can drive friends and even families apart and spur hatred and cruelty.

Yet her book is also an exploration of how people try to maintain their humanity and a sense of normalcy during a time of hardship and stress, finding beauty in day-to-day life and events: an unexpected snowfall, friendship, the world of books, a walk in the countryside.

It’s a subject Chehade knows firsthand: She was born in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, and was on the cusp of adolescence when the country’s civil war broke out. She came to the United States in 1983 and eventually earned an MFA in writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Today she lives in Granby and teaches English in Amherst public schools.

Her first novel, 2010’s “Loom,” a portrait of a Lebanese American family contending with its history and the arrival of a long-missing cousin, won the 2011 Arab American Book Award for fiction.

Chehade tells her new story, in alternating chapters, from the perspectives of Rita, a 14-year-old student in a Beirut school for Christian girls, and Hisham, the Arabic teacher at the school, called Sacre-Coeur, a testament to France’s rule of Lebanon from about 1918 till the end of World War II. (Rita and her friends and family speak Arabic at home, but their classes are in French.)

Rita is a typical teen in most ways – spending time with her friends, thinking about boys, listening to pop records, arguing with her little brother, Tony – but she’s also an avid reader and one of the more thoughtful students in Hisham’s class. She forges a connection with him through her love of books, as Hisham is a bibliophile himself who’s frustrated at times that he can’t seem to prompt more curiosity and engagement from his students.

“We Walked On” doesn’t spell out the causes and details of Lebanon’s civil war, which at times leaves events in the book a little unclear. But through the eyes of Hisham, Rita, and their families — such as Hisham’s somewhat moody wife, Gisele, and his brother, Fuad, as well as Rita’s father, mother, aunt, and two siblings — a picture emerges of Lebanon as a troubled country with many internal divisions and an unpopular, Christian-dominated government that mostly caters to the rich and powerful.

As Hisham observes, “Crammed together, leaderless, the Lebanese made a mess of things … There were at least 18 religious sects across the country, all clamoring for a say. New political parties sprang up like mushrooms, and not one day went by without demonstrations or shootings.”

Hisham, whose wife is Christian but who’s an atheist himself, worries that more violence is coming; his brother, Fuad, is convinced it’s imminent. Rita’s also aware that life is getting more unpredictable and unstable. On a family trip to church on Palm Sunday, she’s suddenly terrified when she’s separated from her parents in the crush of a crowd.

“Images from the last several weeks flashed before my eyes: burned tires and angry mobs, blown-up shops and buildings … I looked suspiciously at the faces around me. Were there killers among us?”

Soon enough, in April 1975, war comes crashing down.

“The first round of gunfire rang out while my mother was baking an apricot crumble, Baba [Rita’s father] was lifting weights in the living room, and Tony was playing with marbles,” Rita relates. When heavy artillery begins to sound, her family drags mattresses into a hallway of their apartment to get away from windows that might shatter.

Some of the strongest scenes in “We Walked On” depict the terror and uncertainty that grip Rita, Hisham, and their friends and families as they try to keep safe, not really knowing what’s happening, even as they try to glean some news through radio broadcasts. Electricity and phone service comes and goes, buildings and windows are shattered, and at one point Rita’s family crams into a crowded basement shelter that reeks of unwashed bodies — and fear.

Then comes the first of a number of ceasefires, and neighborhoods cautiously come alive, with people emerging and shops reopening, like the greengrocer near Hisham’s apartment who sweeps up broken glass in front of his store and moves his produce outside — only to be shot by a sniper before another man bravely rescues him from the street.

Trying to re-establish some sense of normalcy during periods of calm is not easy. When Rita and her fellow students return to school after a couple weeks of canceled classes, she’s furious that her history teacher immediately gives them a test.

“Like we were expected to cram between one bomb and the next till all of it was encrusted deeply in our brains,” she says. “Famous battles, treaties, intrigues. The whole useless litany of a history that kept repeating itself.”

For Hisham, the war in some ways brings him closer to his wife, as they cling to each other for support and use sex to try and keep the madness at bay. Yet he’s also troubled by Fuad’s increasingly aggressive stance on the war. Fuad is not a proponent of violence, but he believes the Palestinians (many are refugees from Israel), Lebanese Muslims, and leftist Christians have legitimate grievances. Eventually Fuad feels he can’t sit on the sidelines anymore and joins that side’s militia.

In fact, “We Walked On” is complicated by the fact that the fathers of both Rita and Hisham have Palestinian roots, even though their families identify as Christian. At one point, Rita, angered by the way the war has turned her life upside down, betrays a Muslim friend at school, then is wracked with guilt over what she’s done. Her struggles are an apt symbol of the larger themes of the war.

Yet the fighting and its fallout, such as losing friends whose families leave Lebanon for other countries, will also lead Rita to think more deeply about politics and fairness, and to focus on the relationships that are important to her.

The novel primarily covers a year of the fighting, with a few final chapters that move Hisham and Rita’s stories into the following decades amid the war’s lingering impact. Rita in particular makes for a compelling voice: Chehade presents Rita’s narration in the first person, and the author has surely drawn on some of her own experiences to bring an eye for detail and a sense of longing — and hope — to the story.

And as Lebanon has once again become a battleground during what is now Israel’s fourth invasion — plus an extended occupation — of the southern part of the country since the 1970s, “We Walked On” can also serve as a good introduction to a chapter of history most Americans are probably not familiar with.

Steve Pfarrer, now retired, is a former arts and features reporter for the Gazette.