Books from Palestine

The Book of Disappearance imagines a startling alternative reality: one morning, all Palestinians living within Israel suddenly vanish without explanation. The disappearance transforms the country, leaving behind empty homes, abandoned workplaces, and a society forced to confront the absence of a population whose presence has shaped its history and everyday life. At the centre of the novel is Alaa, a Palestinian journalist living in Tel Aviv, whose Israeli friend Ariel discovers Alaa’s abandoned diary and begins reading it. Through their intertwined perspectives, the novel explores memory, displacement, belonging, and the political tensions surrounding Palestinian identity. As Ariel searches for meaning in the disappearance, Alaa’s diary reveals the intimate experiences and historical wounds that official narratives often overlook. Blending speculative fiction with social and political commentary, Ibtisam Azem challenges readers to imagine how history, identity, and power might look if those who have been marginalised were suddenly impossible to ignore.

How many lives can one person inhabit before losing sight of who he really is? Adam Dannoun was an infant when the 1948 Nakba tore his family apart and destroyed his childhood home in Lydda, Palestine. Years later, after fleeing an oppressive stepfather, he arrives in Haifa determined to reinvent himself. He becomes Adam Danon, a young man with a fabricated past who claims to be Jewish and born in the Warsaw Ghetto. His new identity offers him a chance to escape his history, but it also traps him in a web of lies, particularly when he falls in love with the daughter of the man who has taken him in. As Adam moves between identities, Elias Khoury explores the devastating consequences of displacement and the impossibility of escaping collective memory. Both a deeply personal story and a sweeping reflection on Palestinian history, this novel asks whether reinvention can ever erase the wounds of the past.

Caught between her Palestinian heritage, her queer identity, and an overwhelming hunger for love, an unnamed young woman struggles to find somewhere she truly belongs. When a painful breakup sends her spiralling, she enters an unconventional treatment centre for what is described as love addiction. Through fragmented memories spanning Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and the United States, she confronts her complicated relationship with her mother, the shame surrounding her sexuality, and the emotional wounds shaping her destructive romantic patterns. Intimate, provocative, and darkly funny, this novel explores the fine line between desire and obsession—and the difficult journey toward accepting yourself when you feel you are always too much for the world.

Born in Palestine on the eve of the 1948 Nakba, five-year-old Sufien is forced to leave his family’s ancestral home, beginning a lifelong journey shaped by displacement and the search for belonging. From a refugee camp in Syria to the oil-rich deserts of Kuwait, the university streets of Florence, and the crowded neighbourhoods of New York, Sufien moves between countries and cultures, repeatedly attempting to build a home somewhere new. Yet every place offers both the promise of reinvention and the painful reminder of what he has lost. In Kuwait, he experiences first love and family estrangement. In Italy, he discovers intellectual freedom and the intoxicating possibilities of life beyond his upbringing. Later, in New York, he forms an unlikely friendship with a wealthy Jewish American man and falls in love with a Jewish woman, creating a family of his own. But even as he establishes roots in the United States, the past remains an enduring presence. Recounted from his deathbed, Sufien’s story moves between memory and reflection, tracing the complicated relationship between exile, identity, and the desire to belong. Inspired by the life of Assadi’s Palestinian father, this lyrical novel explores how displacement reverberates across generations and asks whether home is a place we can recover, a community we create, or an idea we carry within ourselves.

Set in Israel and Palestine in 2000, Ever Land follows two teenage girls whose lives become intertwined across time. Dinah, a Jewish teenager from London, moves to Israel with her family after the death of her beloved father. Struggling to adjust to her new surroundings, she feels increasingly disconnected from the life she has been forced to leave behind. Meanwhile, Safa, a fourteen-year-old Palestinian girl killed during the Six-Day War in 1967, remains trapped in a mysterious limbo she calls the In-Between. Unable to move on without discovering what happened to her younger sister, Nur, Safa watches Dinah settle into the very house where she once lived. When an opportunity to find Nur emerges decades after Safa’s death, she realizes that Dinah may be the key to uncovering the truth. Moving between past and present, Abdelnoor explores displacement, historical memory, belonging, and the human connections that cross political and cultural divisions. Through the contrasting experiences of two young women, the novel examines how history shapes identity and how confronting the past can open possibilities for understanding and compassion.