Yassini Girls
Palestine

Yassini Girls

by Shereen Malherbe

Colonialism Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Fiction 2024

Summary

In the ancient streets of Jerusalem, Fatima receives an unexpected phone call that awakens memories she has spent years trying to bury. Thousands of miles away in the English countryside, Layla discovers a family heirloom hidden beneath her attic floor, setting her on a journey into the painful, long-silenced history of Palestine. As the two women’s stories begin to converge, family secrets reveal the enduring consequences of displacement and the fragile threads connecting generations to their homeland. Inspired by the author’s own discovery of her family’s history during a BBC documentary, Yassini Girls is a deeply personal novel about Palestinian identity, inherited trauma, and the power of storytelling to preserve what history threatens to erase. Through the traditions, memories, and resilience of Palestinian women, it explores how understanding the past can become an act of resistance and a way of safeguarding the future.

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Country
Palestine
Asia
About the author
Shereen Malherbe
Shereen Malherbe

Shereen Malherbe is a British Palestinian novelist, writer, and advocate for authentic Palestinian representation in literature and media. An English Literature graduate, she writes fiction exploring Palestinian history, cultural identity, displacement, and the experiences of Muslims navigating life between different worlds. Her novels include Jasmine Falling, The Tower, The Land Beneath the Light, and Yassini Girls, alongside a children’s book series featuring young characters discovering their cultural heritage. Her work frequently centres the voices and experiences of people whose histories are overlooked or misrepresented. Malherbe’s appearance in the BBC documentary The Holy Land and Us: Our Untold Stories led her to uncover previously unknown details of her family’s connection to Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village where a massacre took place in 1948. This discovery inspired Yassini Girls, her most personal novel, which explores the transmission of memory and trauma across generations. Through her writing, she seeks to preserve Palestinian heritage and bring its stories to a wider international audience.

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Details
Published
2024
Author
Shereen Malherbe