Keeping vigil at the old man's bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes's own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearOne of Kansas City Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of the YearA Boldtype Notable Book of the YearA Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

    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 of 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.

    After abandoning his beloved Mariam when she falls pregnant, and escaping her brothers' bullets, Ibrahim abandons his own ideals and dreams of becoming a novelist, opting instead to follow his father's wishes and seek wealth and commercial success abroad. Thirty years later, lonely and disillusioned, Ibrahim returns to Ramallah to retrace the past he tried to leave behind. He sets out on a long and frustrating quest to track down Mariam, which takes him from the West Bank to Israel. Along the way he encounters his son, Michael, a young man with spiritual powers that enable him to see what is unknown and find what has gone missing. Moving and lyrical, Khalifeh's novel weaves religious and political symbolism into a story of love and loss. At its core is Ibrahim's--the Palestinian's--agonizing but unrelenting search for a home.

    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.

    Born in 1953, Malika Oufkir was the eldest daughter of General Oufkir, the King of Morocco's closest aide. Adopted by the king at the age of five, Malika spent most of her childhood and adolescence in the seclusion of the court harem, one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom, surrounded by luxury and extraordinary privilege. Then, on August 16, 1972, her father was arrested and executed after an attempt to assassinate the king. Malika, her five younger brothers and sisters. and her mother were immediately imprisoned in a desert penal colony. After fifteen years, the last ten of which they spent locked up in solitary cells, the Oufkir children managed to dig a tunnel with their bare hands and make an audacious escape. Recaptured after five days, Malika was finally able to leave Morocco and begin a new life in exile in 1996. A heartrending account in the face of extreme deprivation and the courage with which one family faced its fate, Stolen Lives is an unforgettable story of one woman's journey to freedom.

    From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. Once Upon a Country brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.

    Recognising genuis, the judge decides to spare him and gives him instead a small, blank book, encouraging him to confine his thoughts to it alone. Thus begins the seamless blend of fact and fiction that is Samarkand. Vividly re-creating the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, Amin Maalouf spans continents and centuries with breathtaking vision: the dusky exoticism of 11th-century Persia, with its poetesses and assassins; the same country's struggles nine hundred years later, seen through the eyes of an American academic obsessed with finding the original manuscript; and the fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, whose tragedy led to the Rubaiyaat's final resting place - all are brought to life with keen assurance by this gifted and award-winning writer.

    Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity.

    He enjoys nothing more than heading out into the countryside that surrounds his home. But in recent years, his hikes have become less than bucolic and sometimes downright dangerous. That is because his home is Ramallah, on the Palestinian West Bank, and the landscape he traverses is now the site of a tense standoff between his fellow Palestinians and settlers newly arrived from Israel. In this original and evocative book, we accompany Raja on six walks taken between 1978 and 2006. The earlier forays are peaceful affairs, allowing our guide to meditate at length on the character of his native land, a terrain of olive trees on terraced hillsides, luxuriant valleys carved by sacred springs, carpets of wild iris and hyacinth and ancient monasteries built more than a thousand years ago. Shehadeh's love for this magical place saturates his renderings of its history and topography. But latterly, as seemingly endless concrete is poured to build settlements and their surrounding walls, he finds the old trails are now impassable and the countryside he once traversed freely has become contested ground. He is harassed by Israeli border patrols, watches in terror as a young hiking companion picks up an unexploded missile and even, on one occasion when accompanied by his wife, comes under prolonged gunfire. Amid the many and varied tragedies of the Middle East, the loss of a simple pleasure such as the ability to roam the countryside at will may seem a minor matter. But in Palestinian Walks, Raja Shehadeh's elegy for his lost footpaths becomes a heartbreaking metaphor for the deprivations of an entire people estranged from their land.

    The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis.

    He was there during the Operation 'Cast Lead' and so his daily dispatches came directly from the killing fields of Gaza, and are therefore free of any media distortion or manipulation."—Ilan Pappé, professor of history, University of ExeterAn authoritative and deeply moving eyewitness account of the terrible twenty-two-day Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009. These daily dispatches were written in precarious conditions, between bombing raids and intermittent Internet access. Vittorio Arrigoni ends his dispatches with the plea "stay human," which became the motto of the peace protests in his native Italy. This English translation is updated with new entries reflecting on life in Gaza after the offensive and also features an introduction by famous Israeli historian Ilan Pappé.Vittorio Arrigoni was an internationally renowned human rights activist who served as a volunteer with the pacifist International Solidarity Movement and worked closely with fishermen and farmers in Gaza. During the Israeli offensive against the Gaza Strip in 2008-9, Arrigoni acted as a human shield while working with the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances. Working as a freelance journalist for the Italian daily Il Manifesto, Arrigoni’s daily dispatches, written between bombing raids and patchy internet access, ended with the plea, "stay human," which became the motto of the anti-Israeli peace protests in his native Italy. His authoritative and deeply moving eyewitness account was later published in 2010 in Italian, French, German, and English, which the historian Ilan Pappé described as the "account of an everyman and a true humanist." On April 14, 2011, Arrigoni was kidnapped and brutally murdered by militants in Gaza, which caused an international outcry and was unanimously condemned by Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority.

    Mina sets these personal events against a richly detailed description of events in the history of early 20th century Syria, as the silkworm industry gave way to modern foreign technology. The mode of life described is one of 3 bygone era.

    The adolescent Elie and his family, among hundreds of thousands of Jews from all parts of Eastern Europe, are cruelly deported from their hometown to the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.In the short novel Dawn (1961), Elisha - the sole survivor of his family, whose immolation he witnessed at Auschwitz - has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine. Apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang, he is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. During the lonely hours before dawn, he meditates on the act of murder he is waiting to commit.In The Accident, (1962), Wiesel's second novel, Elisha, now a journalist living in New York, is the victim of a nearly fatal automobile accident. This fiction questions the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions." Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

    The overwhelming majority of the dead were Palestinians, including some 500 children. Another 13,000-odd Palestinians were wounded, and 17,200 homes demolished. These statistics are sadly familiar, as is the political rhetoric from Israeli and Palestinian authorities alike.What is less familiar, however, is a sense of the ordinary Gazan society that war lays to waste.One of the few voices to make it out of Gaza was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia refugee camp, whose eyewitness accounts (published in the Guardian, New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Abu Saif’s complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the events of 2014 from the perspective of a young father, fearing for his family’s safety. In The Drone Eats with Me, Abu Saif brings readers an intimate glimpse of life during wartime, as he, his wife, and his two young children attempt to live their lives with a sense of normalcy, in spite of the ever-present danger and carnage that is swallowing the place they call home.

    Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America. When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a flight of stairs, she traveled back to Iran-now under the Islamic regime-to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.