The latest addition to my website is Ibrahim Fawal‘s On the Hills of God. This tells the story of Ardallah, an idyllic Palestinian town and its inhabitants, focussing on Yousif Safi, aged seventeen, still at school at the start of the novel, only son of the well-off and well-respected local doctor. The novel opens in … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Mahmoud Shukair‘s لقدس و حدها هناك (Jerusalem Stands Alone). This is a series of closely linked (very) short stories telling the stories of a Palestinian family, the unamed Palestinian narrator, a few other linked characters and the city of Jerusalem, a key character in this book. Our family … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Selma Dabbagh‘s Out of It. The book opens in Gaza with the Mujahed family and their friends and neighbours. Rashid is eager to go to a London where he has a scholarship to study and a girlfriend. His twin sister, Iman, is involved in a women’s group and … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Shaw Dallal‘s Scattered Like Seeds. Dallal was a Palestinian who emigrated to the United States via Kuwait, where he had a successful career as a lawyer. This is an autobiographical novel and Dallal is here Thafer Ayoub Allam. We follow his story from a childhood encounter with occupying … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Hala Alyan‘s Salt Houses. This novel tells the story of an extended Palestinian family, from when they are driven out of Nablus (in 1967), having been previously driven out of Jaffa. Some of them go to Kuwait, where they will also be driven out, by Saddam Hussein’s invasion … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Susan Albulhawa ‘s Scar of David (later:Mornings in Jenin). In this novel we follow an extended Palestinian family from the British mandate in the 1940s up to the early 2000s. Our main character is Amal, whom we first meet with an Israeli pressing a gun against her temple. … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Sahar Khalifeh‘s رواية (Wild Thorns). Usama has been working in the Gulf states but has lost his job and is now returning home to the West Bank, nominally to get another job but also, possibly, to carry out a terrorist attack. He is horrified by what he finds … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ghassan Zaqtan‘s حيث اختفى الطائر : رواية (Where the Bird Disappeared). This is the second book in a loose trilogy. I have already read and reviewed the first one and the third one. This is short, effectively a novella. We follow two boys, Yahya and Zakariyya in a … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Anton Shammas‘ ערבסקות, (Arabesques). This is an autobiographical novel (the narrator is called Anton Shammas) which, interestingly enough was written in Hebrew, though it is very much about the Palestinian experience. Shammas tells us the convoluted story of his family in the Palestinian village of Fassuta, about what … Read more
The latest addition to my website is Ibrahim Nasrallah ‘s زمن الخيول البيضاء (Time of White Horses). This is a long novel, actually three related novels in a row, telling of the fate of a Palestinian village, Hadiya (which means peaceful) and its inhabitants from the late nineteenth century and the fading of the Ottoman … Read more