The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah
The Beauty of Your Face navigates a country growing ever more divided. Afaf Rahman, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, is the principal of Nurrideen School for Girls, a Muslim school in the Chicago suburbs. One morning, a shooter–radicalized by the online alt-right–attacks the school.
As Afaf listens to his terrifying progress, we are swept back through her memories: the bigotry she faced as a child, her mother’s dreams of returning to Palestine, and the devastating disappearance of her older sister that tore her family apart. Still, there is the sweetness of the music from her father’s oud, and the hope and community Afaf finally finds in Islam.
I saw Ramallah Mourid Barghouti
Aged 23, Mourid Barghouti graduated from university in Cairo and returned to his family home in Palestine, only to find out he was barred from entering the country due to the Six-Day War that had just taken place. He spent the next 30 years in exile, uncertain of when and if he would see his home and his family. This incredible and poignant account follows his journey.
Rifqa Mohammed El-Kurd
Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurds debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafanis Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the authors own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah–an infamous neighbourhood 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 organisations.
Wild Thorns Sahar Khalifeh
A young Palestinian named Usama returns from working in the Gulf to support the resistance movement. His mission is to blow up buses transporting Palestinian workers into Israel. Shocked to discover that many of his fellow citizens have adjusted to life under military rule, Usama exchanges harsh words with friends and family. Despite uncertainty, he sets out to accomplish his mission …with disastrous consequences. Originally published in Jerusalem, Wild Thorns is the first Arab novel to offer a glimpse of social and personal relations under Israeli occupation.
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
On the eve of her daughter Alias wedding, Salma reads the girls future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is uprooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967.
Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alias brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he cant escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Alia and her family once again lost their home, their land, and their story as they knew it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alias children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities.
The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
Midhat Kamal navigates his way across a fractured world, from the shifting politics of the Middle East to the dinner tables of Montpellier and a newly tumultuous Paris. He discovers that everything is fragile: love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong.
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
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. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship with Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. 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.
Before the Next Bomb Drops by Remi Kanazi
Remi Kanazis poetry presents an unflinching look at the lives of Palestinians under occupation and as refugees scattered across the globe. He captures the Palestinian peoples stubborn refusal to be erased, gives voice to the ongoing struggle for liberation, and explores the meaning of international solidarity.
Dear god, dear bones dear yellow by Noor Hindi
What is political poetry and linguistic activism? What does it mean to bear witness through writing? When language proves insufficient, how do we find and articulate a pathway forward?
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. interrogates, subverts, and expands these questions through poems that are formally and lyrically complex, dynamic, and innovative. With rich intertextuality and an unwavering eye, Noor Hindi explores and interrogates colonialism, religion, patriarchy, and the complex intersections of her identity.
Light in Gaza by Jehad Abusalim
Light in Gaza is a powerful contribution to understanding the Palestinian experience.
Gaza, home to two million people, continues to face suffocating conditions imposed by Israel. This distinctive anthology imagines what the future of Gaza could be while reaffirming the critical role of Gaza in Palestinian identity, history, and struggle for liberation.
Light in Gaza is a seminal, moving and wide-ranging anthology of Palestinian writers and artists. It constitutes a collective effort to organize and centre Palestinian voices in the ongoing struggle.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.
They Fell Like Stars From the Sky & Other Stories by Sheikha Helawy
Celebrate the courage and resilience of Bedouin women and girls of Palestine in this illustrated collection of 18 short stories translated from Arabic.
Glimpse vivid portraits of life on the margins of society: a world of intricate cultural taboos, the tender innocence of growing up, the heart-wrenching tragedies entwined with love.
Meet young girls exploring womanhood with endearing curiosity and a woman whose tattoo defies sexual norms. Witness the tragic fallout of a husband consumed by jealousy over his wifes teenage love and the euphoric passion of an elderly woman’s love for football.
Orientalism by Edward W. Said
Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. Drawing on his own experiences as an Arab Palestinian living in the West, Said examines how these ideas can be a reflection of European imperialism and racism.
Men in the Sun and other Palestinian stories by Ghassan Kanafani
A collection of stories by a Palestinian novelist, journalist, teacher, and activist, including the novella Men in the Sun (1962), the basis of the film The Deceived. Other stories were written during the 1950s and 1960s, and offer a gritty look at the agonized world of Palestine and the adjoining Middle East. Includes an introduction to Kanafani’s life and work.
Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
Short stories describing the Palestinian experience of the Middle East conflict. Each involves a child, a victim of circumstances, who nevertheless participates in the struggle towards a better future. As in Kanafani’s other fiction, these stories explore the need to recover the past by action.
A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish was one of the most acclaimed contemporary poets in the Arab world and is often cited as the poetic voice of the Palestinian people. During the tumultuous summer of 2006, as Israel attacked Gaza and Lebanon, Darwish was in Ramallah. He recorded his observations and feelings in writing including in A River Dies of Thirst, some of his last work. In this collection, Darwish writes of love, loss, and the pain of exile in bittersweet poems and diary entries leavened with hope and joy.
Out of It by Selma Dabbagh
Gaza is being bombed. Rashid wakes to discover he’s got a scholarship to London, the escape route he’s been waiting for. Meanwhile, his twin sister, Iman, frustrated by the atrocities and inaction around her, grabs recklessly at an opportunity to make a difference. Sabri, the oldest brother works on a history of Palestine from his wheelchair as their mother pickles vegetables and feuds with their neighbours. Out of It follows Rashid and Iman as they try to forge places for themselves in the midst of occupation, religious fundamentalism and the divisions between Palestinian factions. It tells of family secrets, unlikely love stories and unburied tragedies as it captures the frustrations and energies of the modern Arab World
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
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 centre 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.
Haifa Fragments by Khulud Khamis
Jewellery designer Maisoon wants an ordinary life, which isn’t easy for a Palestinian citizen of Israel who refuses to be crushed by the feeling she is an unwelcome guest in the land of her ancestors. Inspired after joining an activist peace movement and frustrated by the apathy of her boyfriend and father she lashes out, only to discover her father is not the man she thought he was. Raised a Christian, in a relationship with a Muslim man and enamoured with a Palestinian woman from the Occupied Territories, Maisoon must decide her own path.
Nothing to Lose But Your Life by Suad Amiry
A tomboy at heart, driven by adventure and a desire to understand what her less privileged compatriots go through, architect and university professor Suad Amiry disguises herself as a man and crosses the Israeli border illegally to seek work in the Israeli town of Petah Tikva. The 18-hour journey that she braves with Murad and his brother Mohammed starts with a bumpy late-night ride in a bus crammed with other illegal workers – all men – whose endless stories are both horrifying and amusing. “Nothing to Lose But Your Life” is a vivid account of a gruelling journey but also a lamentation for lost land and for simpler, more peaceful times.
Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
These poems emerge directly from the experience of growing up and living in constant lockdown, and often under direct attack. Like Gaza itself, they are filled with rubble and the ever-present menace of surveillance drones policing a people unwelcome in their own land, and they are also suffused with the smell of tea, roses in bloom, and the view of the sea at sunset. Children are born, families continue traditions, students attend university, and libraries rise from the ruins as Palestinians go on about their lives, creating beauty and finding new ways to survive.
Accompanied by an in-depth interview (conducted by Ammiel Alcalay) in which Abu Toha discusses life in Gaza, his family origins, and how he came to poetry.
Where the Bird Disappeared by Ghassan Zaqtan
This lyrical novel, set in the surroundings of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya, weaves a narrative rich in sensory detail yet troubled by the porousness of memory. It tells the story of the relationship between two figures of deep mythical resonance in the region, Yahya and Zakariyya, figures who live in the present but bear the names–and many traits–of two saints. Ranging from today into back to pre-1948 Palestine, the book presents both a compelling portrait of a contemporary village and a sacred geography that lies beyond and beneath the present state of the world.
Against the Loveless World Susan Abulhawa
Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square metres of glossy grey cinderblock, devoid of time, its patterns of light and dark nothing to do with day and night. Journalists visit her, but get nowhere; because Nahr is not going to share her story with them.
The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist, and a whore; some might call her a revolutionary, or a hero. But the truth is, Nahr has always been many things, and had many names.
She was a girl who learned, early and painfully, that when you are a second class citizen love is a kind of desperation; she learned, above all else, to survive.
She was a girl who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes, and without looking for it found what she had always lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose, politics, friends. She found a dark-eyed man called Bilal, who taught her to resist; who tried to save her when it was already too late.
Nahr sits in the Cube, and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal, who isn’t there; Bilal, who may not even be alive, but who is her only reason to get out.
Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry
Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a fifteen-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the thirteen-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. In this prosperous and cosmopolitan port city, with its bustling markets, cinemas, and cafés on the hills overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, we meet many other unforgettable characters as well, including Khawaja Michael, the elegant and successful owner of orange groves above the harbor; Mr. Hassan, the tailor who makes Subhis treasured English suit, which he hopes will change his life; and the very mischievous and outrageous Uncle Habeeb, who insists on introducing Subhi to the local bordello.
With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had always been a city welcoming to outsidersthe Mother of Strangerswhere Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived peacefully together. Once the bombardment of the city begins in April 1948, Suad Amiry gives us the grim but fascinating details of the shock, panic, and destruction that ensues. Jaffa becomes unrecognizable, with neighborhoods flattened, families removed from their homes and separated, and those who remain in constant danger of arrest and incarceration. Most of the population flees eastward to Jordan or by sea to Lebanon in the north or to Egypt and Gaza in the south. Subhi and Shams will never see each other again.
My First and Only Love Sahar Khalifeh
Nidal, after many decades of restless exile, returns to her family home in Nablus, where she had lived with her grandmother before the 1948 Nakba that scattered her family across the globe. She was a young girl when the popular resistance began and, through the bloodshed and bitter struggle, Nidal fell in love with freedom fighter Rabie. He was her first and only real love-him and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land.
Many years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amin’s memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers the secret history of her absent mother.
Secrets Under the Olive Tree by Nevien Shaabneh
Layla Anwar is a young Palestinian born into a land plagued with war and an apartheid regime. She knows all too well what it means to be an outcast, second class in a country she calls home. But Layla is also an outsider within her village and family. Whispers surround her growing up… ones that mask the secrets her family has kept for generations. Secrets and subjugation continue to plague Layla’s adolescence and young adult life after the move to America, as the monsters of her past threaten to break the relationships she most cherishes. A lifetime of tragedy haunts her until she is forced to confront the truth and rectify the mistakes that have shaped her destiny. Layla uncovers the unholiest of secrets on her path to redemption as she discovers the truth of her family’s history.
In My Mother’s Footsteps by Mona Hajjar Halaby
1948, Jerusalem. Zakia is forced to flee the only home shes ever known as war rips through the leafy streets and the bustling spice-filled souqs. Taking just one suitcase, Zakia thinks shell be able to return soon. But within weeks, she realises she wont be allowed back to her beloved homeland.
2007, California. Mona grew up with her mother Zakias memories of Palestine, imagining the muezzins call for prayer and the medley of church bells her mother so vividly described to her. So, when Mona gets the opportunity to teach conflict resolution in Ramallah, she also embarks on a personal pilgrimage to find her mothers home in militarized and occupied Jerusalem.
With cherished letters from her mother who writes to Mona regularly, sharing her story of Jerusalem, Mona dreams of one day being guided by her through the winding cobblestone alleys of the Old City. Yet it is Mona who instead holds her mothers hand as they finally visit Jerusalem together. After fifty-nine years of exile, her mother is returning to the place she once called home but can a lifetime of loss ever be healed?
The Palace of Angels Mohammed Massoud Morsi
Published in 2020, this novel was shortlisted for several literary prizes, including the NSW Premiers Literary Award for Fiction 2020 Australia, and appeared on both the long and short list for the Voss Literary Award 2020. Based on a true story this novel is about life, death, identity and love. The complexities of life in Palestine come to life in this most recent book by Morsi about life in the country.
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story Ghada Karmi
Karmi discusses her childhood in Palestine, and subsequent displacement in the UK. This seminal text covers the human cost of the seismic changes that took place in Palestine during the 20th century.
Speak, Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales Ibrahim Muhawi, Sharif Kanaana
his collection of Palestinian traditional folktales is an excellent introduction into the collective history of the region. Over many years Muhawi and Kanaana travelled throughout Palestine, to write down many of the oral folktales told throughout the country. This thoughtfully put together anthology takes astute care to accurately depict the nuances of Arab storytelling, retaining the humour, culture and context of the original Palestinian stories.
