Reading Palestine

After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. This is her first trip back since the second intifada and the deaths of their grandparents: while Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia stayed in London to focus on her acting career and her now-dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.At Haneen’s, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Sonia is soon rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa, along with a dedicated group of men from all over historic Palestine who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.A bold, evocative new novel from the Sue Kaufman, Betty Trask and Plimpton Prize Award winner Isabella Hammad that follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. A stunning rendering of present-day Palestine, Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite feat, an unforgettable story of artistry under occupation.

How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live? Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict. Yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters—and both daughters are now lost. When Rami and Bassam meet and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends. And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal and the power to change the world.EndorsementsA New York Times bestseller.Longlisted for the Booker Prize; shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award, the Prix Femina, the Prix Médicis, and the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award. Winner of the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the 2020 National Jewish Book Award.Chosen as a Book of 2020 by the Sunday Times, the Observer, the Guardian, i, the Financial Times, New Statesman, The Scotsman, The Irish Times, BBC.com, and Waterstones.com.'A wondrous book. It left me hopeful; this is its gift' — Elizabeth Strout'An empathy engine ... It is, itself, an agent of change' — New York Times Book Review'A quite extraordinary novel' — Kamila Shamsie'The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting ... A spectacular structure of stories about everything' — Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

Heart-breaking, hopeful and horrifying, I Shall Not Hate is a Palestinian doctor's inspiring account of his extraordinary life, growing up in poverty but determined to treat his patients in Gaza and Israel regardless of their ethnic origin.Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and infertility specialist who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He received a scholarship to study medicine in Cairo and earned a diploma from the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of London. He completed a residency at Soroka Hospital in Israel, undertook a subspecialty in fetal medicine in Italy and Belgium, and completed a master’s in public health at Harvard University.He lives in Gaza but worked in Israel and has spent most of his life crossing the lines that divide Israelis and Palestinians — treating patients on both sides and advocating for improved health and education for women as a way forward in the Middle East.On 16 January 2009, during Israel's incursion into the Gaza Strip, three of his daughters were killed by Israeli shells. Instead of seeking revenge or sinking into hatred, Abuelaish called for people in the region to start talking to each other. His deepest hope is that his daughters will be 'the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis'.Before his daughters were killed, Dr Abuelaish worked as a researcher at the Gerner Institute at Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv. He now lives with his family in Toronto, where he is an associate professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto.Endorsements'who has devoted his life to medicine and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians' — New York Times

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today's clash of civilisations. How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the 'centre of the world' and now the key to peace in the Middle East?Drawing on new archives and a lifetime's study, Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem.This is not only the epic story of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and co-existence, but also a freshly-updated history of the entire Middle East, from King David to the twenty-first century, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the wars of today. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem - the only city that exists twice - in heaven and on earth.The story of Jerusalem is the story of the world. A classic of modern literature.

Written in 1993 during Rafeedie’s time in Zionist prison, the novel was confiscated by prison guards, smuggled out by Wisam's comrades, and soon became a significant text for the Palestinian prisoners' movement.The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional, and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real-life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.Love, revolution, and life — these are the "Trinity of Fundamentals" that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.

“I gathered these texts like someone collecting body parts. Here are the pieces of my body, haphazardly brought together in a paper bag. It looks like me with all my madness and sickness—how the revolution made me grow up, what the war broke inside me, and what exile chipped away.”The texts gathered in Ever Since I Did Not Die by Syrian-Palestinian poet Ramy Al-Asheq are a poignant record of a fateful journey. Having grown up in a refugee camp in Damascus, Al-Asheq was imprisoned and persecuted by the regime in 2011 during the Syrian Revolution. He was released from jail, only to be recaptured and imprisoned in Jordan. After escaping from prison, he spent two years in Jordan under a fake name and passport, during which he won a literary fellowship that allowed him to travel to Germany in 2014, where he lives and writes in exile.Through seventeen powerful testimonies, Ever Since I Did Not Die vividly depicts what it means to live through war. Exquisitely weaving the past with the present and fond memories with brutal realities, this volume celebrates resistance through words that refuse to surrender and continue to create beauty amidst destruction—one of the most potent ways to survive in the darkest of hours.

An intimate and powerful narrative in which the Israel-Palestine conflict is presented, unusually, from the Palestinian side. In Search of Fatima reflects the author’s personal experiences of displacement, loss and nostalgia against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped Middle East conflict.In Search of Fatima is a powerful biographical story, but it is also a book that transcends its author’s own experience. It speaks for the millions of people all over the world who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither. An account not of the physical hardship and abuse suffered by many refugees, but rather an exploration of the subtler privations of psychological displacement and loss of identity.

Forcibly removed from the ancient village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejas are moved into the Jenin refugee camp. There, exiled from his beloved olive groves, the family patriarch languishes with a broken heart, his eldest son fathers a family and falls victim to an Israeli bullet, and his grandchildren struggle against tragedy toward freedom, peace, and home. This is the Palestinian story, told as never before, through four generations of a single family.The very precariousness of existence in the camps quickens life itself. Amal, the patriarch's bright granddaughter, feels this with certainty when she discovers the joys of young friendship and first love and especially when she loses her adored father, who read to her daily as a young girl in the quiet of the early dawn. Through Amal we get the stories of her twin brothers, one who is kidnapped by an Israeli soldier and raised Jewish; the other who sacrifices everything for the Palestinian cause. Amal’s own dramatic story threads between the major Palestinian-Israeli clashes of three decades; it is one of love and loss, of childhood, marriage, and parenthood, and finally of the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has.The deep and moving humanity of Mornings in Jenin forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining political conflicts of our lifetimes.A heart-wrenching, powerfully written novel that could do for Palestine what The Kite Runner did for Afghanistan.

Translated by Elisabeth JaquetteMinor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed one year after the War of 1948, which Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement, exile, and refuge of more than 700,000 people, and which Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence.Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah reads about this “minor detail” in a larger context, and becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession.In this compelling novel, Shibli’s haunting prose is a form of resistance in itself.

Israel’s military industrial complex uses the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that it then exports around the world to despots and democracies.For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an "enemy" population, the Palestinians. It’s here that they have perfected the architecture of control.Journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers this largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows, in-depth and for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for Israeli military-techno surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality — and for the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'.From the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos's and Jamal Khashoggi's phones, to weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingya and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown, Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe’s most brutal conflicts. As ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate model.How Israel makes a killing from the occupation of Palestine

Since the Holocaust, it has been almost impossible to hide large-scale crimes against humanity. In our communicative world, few modern catastrophes are concealed from the public eye. And yet, Ilan Pappé unveils that one such crime has been erased from the global public memory: the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948.But why is it denied, and by whom? The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine offers an investigation into this mystery.

Raised in a conservative and emotionally volatile Palestinian family in Brooklyn, Yara thought she would finally feel free when she married a charming entrepreneur who took her to the suburbs. She’s gotten to follow her dreams, completing an undergraduate degree in Art and landing a good job at the local college. As a traditional wife, she also raises their two school-aged daughters, takes care of the house, and has dinner ready when her husband gets home. With her family balanced with her professional ambitions, Yara knows that her life is infinitely more rewarding than her own mother’s. So why doesn’t it feel like enough?After her dream of chaperoning a student trip to Europe evaporates and she responds to a colleague’s racist provocation, Yara is put on probation at work and must attend mandatory counseling to keep her position. Her mother blames a family curse for the trouble she’s facing, and while Yara doesn’t really believe in old superstitions, she still finds herself growing increasingly uneasy with her mother’s warning and the possibility of falling victim to the same mistakes.Shaken to the core by these indictments of her life, Yara finds her carefully constructed world beginning to implode. To save herself, Yara must reckon with the reality that the difficulties of the childhood she thought she left behind have very real—and damaging—implications not just on her own future but that of her daughters.A striking exploration of the expectations of Palestinian-American women, the meaning of a fulfilling life, and the ways our unresolved pasts affect our presents.EndorsementsNew York Times bestselling author of A Woman Is No Man.

Rafah, a town at the bottommost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front trash-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. On the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been bulldozed to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this bitterest of conflicts.Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident in 1956 that left 111 Palestinians dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah—cold-blooded massacre or dreadful mistake—reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco immerses himself in daily life of Rafah and the neighboring town of Khan Younis, uncovering Gaza past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy.As in Palestine and Safe Area Goražde, Sacco’s unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into an intimate and immediate experience.From the great cartoonist-reporter, a sweeping, original investigation of a forgotten crime in the most vexed of places.

‘Why can you not be friends anymore?’It was the story of his country, he supposed. Perhaps they could have been friends. Perhaps they were once. The reasons were complex, full of feeling, disappointment, resentment. And, of course, betrayal. This was the Middle East after all.Avi Dahan, a retired detective mourning his beloved wife in Tel Aviv, and Khalid Mansour, a Palestinian doctor confronting the precarious reality of living in Gaza City, are still reeling from the political fallout that jeopardised their delicate friendship. When a mysterious corpse scarred by history and forbidden love shows up in Khalid’s emergency room, he reaches out to Avi for help. Though the detective is the only one who might be able to assist, he is the last person on earth to agree …Did it really matter? In the face of chaos, was it important how she had died? That was the guidance he needed from Avi now. He needed to understand that question: did it matter anymore? Was it of any significance, how you died in a war?The stage is set for Andrew Brown’s unforgettable new novel, The Bitterness of Olives.

Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy's clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father.Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Maleka prepares to leave home to attend university abroad, her mother revisits the past of their Palestinian family, tenderly describing their life in exile in Kuwait and her own experiences of love and loss as she grows up.Huzama Habayeb weaves a richly observed and affectionate portrait of a Palestinian family displaced from their homeland, exploring with humour and poise the love and betrayal that pursues Jihad and her family from Kuwait to Jordan to Dubai.This is a novel whose words will resound long after you finish the final page.Translated from the Arabic by Kay HeikkinenEndorsementsAs featured as an editor's pick on Radio Four's Open Book."An immersive feminist novel that meshes the personal and political to moving effect." — Preti Taneja, Financial Times"A brilliant novel of the Palestinian diaspora. Funny and gritty, and bursting with life and humour." — Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian

Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This account of his early life reveals how it influenced his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir until he was 'banished' to America in 1951. This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir of his ferociously demanding 'Victorian' father and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother.

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanfani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah—an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today's struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that "Freedom is a constant struggle."

In 1899, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, mayor of Jerusalem, alarmed by the Zionist call to create a Jewish national home in Palestine, wrote a letter aimed at Theodore Herzl: the country had an indigenous people who would not easily accept their own displacement. He warned of the perils ahead, ending his note, "in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone." Thus Rashid Khalidi, al-Khalidi's great-great-nephew, begins this sweeping history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory. Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel, but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age. He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.Original, authoritative, and important, The Hundred Years' War on Palestine is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces arrayed against the Palestinians, it offers an illuminating new view of a conflict that continues to this day.A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.

On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs.Although she keeps her predictions to herself that day, they soon come to pass in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Caught up in the resistance, Alia’s brother disappears, while Alia and her husband move from Nablus to Kuwait City. Reluctantly they build a life, torn between needing to remember and learning to forget.When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, Alia and her family yet again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it. Scattering to Beirut, Paris and Boston, Alia’s children begin families of their own, once more navigating the burdens and blessings of beginning again.Where do you go when you can’t go home?Endorsements‘A piercingly elegant novel . . . with the power to both break and mend your heart.’ — Ru Freeman, author of On Sal Mal Lane‘Epic in scope and uniquely relevant in its concern for displacement. Particularly well-suited for our times, then.’ — Red

The Parachute Paradox is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the Palestinian perspective. Through the lens of a Jerusalemite artist, Steve Sabella takes the reader on a journey of identity and a path to internal peace. This captivating memoir is infused with exceptional cinematographic energy, artistry, and uniqueness in conveying the scene. It offers narrative storytelling of the life of the Jerusalemite artist and his experiences under Israeli occupation and proposes a subject that is unprecedented in Palestinian literature: the liberation of the self and the homeland through the liberation of the imagination. Sabella's writing is thrilling, challenging, inspiring, and thoughtful. It embraces the reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict and gives the reader a taste of the spiritual and imaginative vision necessary to take us beyond the boxes that entrap us. The Parachute Paradox is an inspirational work of art that is sure to leave readers thought-provoked and compelled.EndorsementsWinner of the 2017 Eric Hoffer Award and the 2016 Nautilus Book Awards for Best Memoir."Offers narrative storytelling of the life of the Jerusalemite artist and his experiences under Israeli occupation. It proposes a subject that is unprecedented in Palestinian literature: the liberation of the self and the homeland through the liberation of the imagination." — Mohammed Al-Asaad Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, London"The number of books about Israel and Palestine published every year can feel oppressive to the average reader. On rare occasions, an original narrative of the conflict, imbued with honesty and sensitivity, is published." — Joseph Dana, The National, UAE"Perhaps the fact that the author is an accomplished artist and photographer explains the volume's elegant appearance. We later discover a young man whose freedom does not exist except as an expression of his art and as an endless love for the girl of his dreams." — Eric Hoffer Award winner announcement on The US Review of Books"The Parachute Paradox is perhaps the most impressive book I have ever read on the Palestinian-Jewish conflict. A good book to read and to go through gently, piece by piece." — Moors Magazine, The Netherlands"Thrilling, challenging, inspiring, thoughtful. The Parachute Paradox is part romance, part thriller, part political analysis. It is thoroughly redemptive and frustrating at the same time. It embraces the reality of a journey of identity and a path to internal peace. Any interested party in the Arab-Israeli conflict must read this firsthand account. In it, Steve tracks all the harmful pitfalls of stereotypes and gives the reader a taste of the kind of spiritual vision necessary to take us beyond the boxes that entrap us." — Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, New York"A thought-provoking, compelling and beautifully crafted memoir. From the brilliant metaphor in the title to the last page, this book is an inspirational work of art." — Joanna Barakat, Palestinian artist"A must-read for the Palestinian perspective. Thankfully, this memoir is a journey that ends with an epiphany." — Rod Such, The Palestine Chronicle

On a hot day in Bethlehem, a 12-year-old Palestinian-American girl is yelled at by a group of men outside the Church of the Nativity. She has exposed her legs in a biblical city, an act they deem forbidden, and their judgement will echo on through her adolescence. When our narrator finally admits to her mother that she is queer, her mother's response only intensifies a sense of shame: "You exist too much," she tells her daughter.Told in vignettes that flash between the U.S. and the Middle East — from New York to Jordan, Lebanon, and Palestine — Zaina Arafat's debut novel traces her protagonist's progress from blushing teen to sought-after DJ and aspiring writer. In Brooklyn, she moves into an apartment with her first serious girlfriend and tries to content herself with their comfortable relationship. But soon her longings, so closely hidden during her teenage years, explode out into reckless romantic encounters and obsessions with other people.Her desire to thwart her own destructive impulses will eventually lead her to The Ledge, an unconventional treatment center that identifies her affliction as "love addiction." In this strange, enclosed society she will start to consider the unnerving similarities between her own internal traumas and divisions and those of the places that have formed her.Opening up the fantasies and desires of one young woman caught between cultural, religious, and sexual identities, You Exist Too Much is a captivating story charting two of our most intense longings: for love, and a place to call home.

An exciting debut novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—whose lives intersect across divides of class, generation, and religion.Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh, whose aunt married into the wealthy Ammar family, confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” the family. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, by shifting perspectives, weaves a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.

This is Gaza – a place of humanity and creativity, rich in culture and industry. A place now utterly devastated, its entire population displaced by a seemingly endless onslaught, its heritage destroyed.Daybreak in Gaza is a record of an extraordinary place and people, and of a culture preserved by the people themselves. Vignettes of artists, acrobats, doctors, students, shopkeepers and teachers offer stories of love, life, loss and survival. They display the wealth of Gaza's cultural landscape and the breadth of its history.Daybreak in Gaza humanises the people dismissed as statistics. It stands as a mark of resistance to the destruction and as a testament to the people of Gaza.

The Coin follows a Palestinian woman as she pursues a dream that generations of her family have failed at: to live and thrive in America. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys in New York, where her eccentric methods cross conventional boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags, the value of which "increases, year by year, regardless of poverty, of war, of famine." The juxtaposition of luxury and the abject engulfs her as she is able to con her way to bag after bag, preoccupied by the suffering she knows of the world.Eventually, her body and mind go to war. America is stifling her—her willfulness, her sexuality, her ideology. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her feelings of existential statelessness, and the narrator unravels spectacularly.Enthralling, sensory, and uncanny, The Coin explores materiality, nature and civilization, class, homelessness, sexuality, beauty—and how oppression and inherited trauma manifest in every area of our lives—all while resisting easy moralizing.A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling, far from home, as she gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags. Provocative and original, humorous and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.

A sweeping and lyrical novel that follows a young Palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family throughout the Middle East.As Nahr sits locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 1970s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she's forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.Perfect for readers of international literary bestsellers including Washington Black, My Sister, The Serial Killer, and Her Body and Other Parties.

When the state of Israel was formed in 1948, it precipitated the Nakba or 'disaster': the displacement of the Palestinian nation, creating fracture-lines which continue to erupt in violent and tragic ways today.In the years that followed, while the Berlin Wall crumbled and South Africa abolished apartheid, the Israeli government rejected every opportunity for reconciliation with Palestine. But Raja Shehadeh, a human rights lawyer, suggests that this does not mean the two nations cannot work together as partners on the road to peace rather than genocide.A searing reflection on the failures of Israel to treat Palestine and Palestinians as equals, as partners on the road to peace instead of genocide. In graceful, devastatingly observed prose, this is a fresh perspective for a time of great need.

What is the future of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement directed at Israel? Which is more viable, the binational or one-state solution? Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss these critical questions and more in this urgent and timely book, a sequel to their acclaimed Gaza in Crisis.On Palestine is Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé's indispensable update on a suffering region.Endorsements"Chomsky is a global phenomenon... He may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet." — The New York Times Book Review"Ilan Pappé is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian." — John Pilger"This sober and unflinching analysis should be read and reckoned with by anyone concerned with practicable change in the long-suffering region." — Publishers Weekly (on Gaza in Crisis)

Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile—shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them; separated from his family for years at a time; never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.” A tour de force of memory and reflection, lamentation and resilience, I Saw Ramallah is a deeply humane book, essential to any balanced understanding of today’s Middle East.This fierce and moving work is an unparalleled rendering of the human aspects of the Palestinian predicament.EndorsementsWinner of the prestigious Naguib Mahfouz Medal.

When the ground beneath your feet is always shifting, how can you ever know where you belong?Jamilah has always believed she knows where her home is: a house above a paint shop on the outskirts of Beirut with her large, chaotic, loving family. But she soon learns that as Palestinian refugees, her family's life in Lebanon is precarious, and they must try to blend in even as they fight to retain their identity. When conflict comes to Beirut, Jamilah's world fractures, and the family is forced to flee again, slipping further away from Palestine, the homeland to which they cannot return. In the end, Jamilah will have to choose between holding on to everything she knows and pursuing a life she can truly call her own.Songs for the Dead and the Living is a coming-of-age tale played out across generations and continents, from Palestine to Australia. Through stunning prose, acclaimed writer and human-rights activist Sara M. Saleh offers a breathtaking portrait of the fragilities and flaws of family in the wake of war, and the love it takes to overcome great loss.

Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives. Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them. Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha's poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.A candid, horrific, and deeply touching new collection of poems about life in Gaza by an award-winning Palestinian poet.

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Lecture at Columbia University nine days before 7 October 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what feels like a turning point in the narrative of human history.Moving and erudite, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognising the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.EndorsementsFrom the Women’s Prize for Fiction-shortlisted author of Enter Ghost."Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose." — Sally Rooney"A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves." — Max Porter"Hammad’s writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change." — Olivia Sudjic