Books in the Hoopoe Fiction series

A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girls eyes by acclaimed writer, Sahar Khalifeh, called the Virginia Woolf of Palestinian literature (Brsenblatt)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 lovehim 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 Amins 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.

"K is an introverted man in his mid-twenties, working for a big, faceless petrochemical company. After reading Kafka, K decides to write his own diary, but he is constantly frustrated by his lack of experiences, his concerns about his privacy, and the demands of his dull job and family. When he receives the news that he has leukemia, he finds himself torn between a sense of devastation and a revelation that he has finally found a way out of his writing predicament, as he begins to rebel against the social and economic constrains that threaten to overwhelm him. Through Aziz Mohammed's measured but forceful writing, this is an absorbing, sensitive, and at times darkly humorous telling of K's experience of illness, his contemplation of death, and his determination to maintain his independence of decision through it all"--