A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girl's
eyes by acclaimed writer, Sahar Khalifeh, called "the Virginia Woolf of
Palestinian literature" (Börsenblatt)
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.
Filled with emotional urgency and political immediacy, Sahar Khalifeh
spins an epic tale reaching from the final days of the British Mandate
to today with clear-eyed realism and great imagination.