Here are 76 books that Sabra Zoo fans have personally recommended if you like
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My father is Palestinian, my mother English. I am a typical diaspora Palestinian, having moved many times. I’m intrigued by what this highly politicized nationality–being Palestinian–does to peoples’ emotions, their desire to be accepted and thrive, their sense of community, their ability to deal with the challenges and joys of political engagement as well as the difficulties of not being political if they choose not to be. Being Palestinian is an extreme case of what humans can be forced to endure as political and social animals. Living under military occupation gives rise to huge sacrifices and pure heroism in the most quotidian way. Acts that deserve recognition.
This is a slim volume that is playful, sweet, and natural in tone, although the setting, Gaza, is never associated with the playful, the sweet, and the whole regime that governs it is as far from being natural as is feasibly possible.
I had not read a voice like Heba’s before, warm yet wise beyond her years and full of humor, intelligence, and originality. There is an excellent playlist that ranges from Nina Simone to Mashrou’ Leila, which covers aspects of her life, from fluffy slippers to political debates to the love of family and women. ‘Late capitalism is the bane of my life,’ Hayek writes, ‘sometimes it feels as though these algorithms have encrypted my very brain.’
As a teenager in Gaza, she uses Google Maps to explore cities she cannot access, but when homesick in exile later, in Europe or the US there is an equivalent way of…
Tender yet brutal vignettes on a girlhood in Gaza, Palestine, filled with honey and warmth.
Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies is written for those who had to leave—collected remembrances of a childhood in Gaza by a woman far from Palestine’s sun and sea. Overindulgent, chaotic and sentimental, Heba Hayek’s narrator struggles to navigate life in colder, unfamiliar worlds. She holds tightly to memories of home, hoping they will lead back to her sisters and mothers.
With brilliance and grace, Hayek’s vignettes explore the methods of survival nurtured by Palestinian women in the face of colonial occupation and patriarchy—the power of community…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My father is Palestinian, my mother English. I am a typical diaspora Palestinian, having moved many times. I’m intrigued by what this highly politicized nationality–being Palestinian–does to peoples’ emotions, their desire to be accepted and thrive, their sense of community, their ability to deal with the challenges and joys of political engagement as well as the difficulties of not being political if they choose not to be. Being Palestinian is an extreme case of what humans can be forced to endure as political and social animals. Living under military occupation gives rise to huge sacrifices and pure heroism in the most quotidian way. Acts that deserve recognition.
Take the bleakest setting you can imagine–such as a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon –quadruple the population, encircle it, populate it with militias, then turn yourself into an absurdist or a surrealist to describe it. This seems to be the task that Maarouf has set himself with this collection of short stories, which are as funny and surprising as they are somber and sobering.
He is a poet and a comedian. The poet in him stops, dwells, absorbs, and is porous to the unfolding loss around him before the comedian kicks in with his will to survive. A quirky, uncanny collection.
LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019
A brilliant collection of fictions in the vein of Roald Dahl, Etgar Keret and Amy Hempel. These are stories of what the world looks like from a child's pure but sometimes vengeful or muddled perspective. These are stories of life in a war zone, life peppered by surreal mistakes, tragic accidents and painful encounters. These are stories of fantasist matadors, lost limbs and perplexed voyeurs. This is a collection about sex, death and the all-important skill of making life into a joke. These are unexpected stories by a very fresh voice. These…
My father is Palestinian, my mother English. I am a typical diaspora Palestinian, having moved many times. I’m intrigued by what this highly politicized nationality–being Palestinian–does to peoples’ emotions, their desire to be accepted and thrive, their sense of community, their ability to deal with the challenges and joys of political engagement as well as the difficulties of not being political if they choose not to be. Being Palestinian is an extreme case of what humans can be forced to endure as political and social animals. Living under military occupation gives rise to huge sacrifices and pure heroism in the most quotidian way. Acts that deserve recognition.
Azem takes a premise here and runs with it. How about, she asks, if all the Palestinians just disappeared, what would the reaction be?
The heart of the novel is the grandmother character, who dies as the book opens and the other Palestinians vanish and I wanted more recollections of her, more of her dialogue. Set mainly between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, the fusing of the two names irritates the grandmother, who says it’s "just like someone being up your ass. You don’t see them, and they never let go."
There are sharp cameos here of Israeli-Palestinian relations, from buyers and sellers to torturers and prisoners, pimps and sex workers. I found the conclusion to be too bleak, but the writing is good, and the observations are sharp.
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
My father is Palestinian, my mother English. I am a typical diaspora Palestinian, having moved many times. I’m intrigued by what this highly politicized nationality–being Palestinian–does to peoples’ emotions, their desire to be accepted and thrive, their sense of community, their ability to deal with the challenges and joys of political engagement as well as the difficulties of not being political if they choose not to be. Being Palestinian is an extreme case of what humans can be forced to endure as political and social animals. Living under military occupation gives rise to huge sacrifices and pure heroism in the most quotidian way. Acts that deserve recognition.
At a time of death and destruction in Gaza, this book is one of the only volumes that brings to the English language reader some of the voices from inside a small strip of land that has been under siege by land, sea, and air for sixteen years.
Although the quality of the writing is variable, I found that the rawness of the collection made the writers seem more intimate. With some gutsy writing by women and tender pieces by men, the anthology subverts assumptions and provides a wide heterogeneity of voices to the fore.
Under the Israeli occupation of the '70s and '80s, writers in Gaza had to go to considerable lengths to ever have a chance of seeing their work in print. Manuscripts were written out longhand, invariably under pseudonyms, and smuggled out of the Strip to Jerusalem, Cairo or Beirut, where they then had to be typed up. Consequently, fiction grew shorter, novels became novellas, and short stories flourished as the city's form of choice. Indeed, to Palestinians elsewhere, Gaza became known as 'the exporter of oranges and short stories'. This anthology brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short…
I am a historian at University College London, where I examine Palestinian refugee history in both my writing and my teaching. I first visited a Palestinian refugee camp 15 years ago, and I’ve spent much of my life since then researching the subject’s history and politics. As I see it, this topic is really the key to understanding the political dynamics of Israel-Palestine today. While a huge amount has been written on Israel-Palestine, I have always found that the most striking and informative works focus on refugees’ own experiences – and that’s the common thread running through the books I’ve chosen here.
Gate of the Sun is one of the most acclaimed novels about the so-called “question of Palestine.”
Although fictional, it hews closely to real life; the author Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer, was informed by the extensive time he spent talking to Palestinian refugees in various camps. The book is set in Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon and has an epic scope, weaving together different characters’ experiences of displacement and exile and spanning six decades from the 1930s to the 1990s.
Along the way, we engage with some of the most pivotal moments in recent Palestinian history: the original displacement of 1948 (known as the Nakba); the Arab defeat of 1967; the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila camps. Epic in every sense.
“An imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork” that vividly captures the Palestinian experience following the creation of the Israeli state (New York Times Book Review)
After Palestine is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut—entering a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope.
Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes,…
Conflict resolution and intergroup relations are my passions. Perhaps because I’m a child of the Holocaust. My parents and I arrived in the U.S. as stateless refugees. The Holocaust primed me to explore why religion inspires so much hate. My career as a criminologist got me interested in the link between religion and violence. My refugee roots led me to an International Rescue Committee report on the Syrian crisis. That report hit me hard and felt very personal because it echoed my own family’s suffering in the Holocaust. I saw an opportunity to build bridges between enemies—Israel and Syria, Jews and Muslims—while also saving lives.
I was blown away by this narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian perspective. Sari Nusseibeh is the scion of one of the oldest and most distinguished Palestinian families. So important are they that the Nusseibehs hold the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and are charged with opening the Church each day. Despite the fact that Sari and his family lost so much when Israel declared statehood in 1948, I was moved by the absence of malice in what I found to be a balanced account of “the Nakbah.” After reading the book, I was eager to meet Sari, who was at the time president of Al Quds University. My husband and I did get to spend a day with him on campus, where we learned even more about the Palestinian side of the conflict.
These extraordinary memoirs give us a rare view into what the Arab-Israeli conflict has meant for one Palestinian family over the generations. Nusseibeh also interweaves his own story with that of the Palestinians as a people, always speaking his mind, and apportioning blame where he feels it due. Hated by extremists on both sides, his is a rare voice.
"This autobiography? carries the passion that might embolden ordinary Israelis and Palestinians to bypass the politicians and establish the peace that all but the armoured men desperately want." The Independent
"Nusseibeh's formidable achievement? leaves a drop of despair, because of how…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Although I am Jewish, I didn’t know much about Israel until college. I studied in Cairo and Jerusalem and became very committed to Palestinian rights. I married a Palestinian Muslim, and we raised our daughters in the West Bank under Israeli occupation. Now, I spend most of my time talking with people about the need for justice, peace, security, and dignity for everyone and explaining why equality for Palestinians is not only a moral stance but one that is also good for Jews. The books I recommended help young people understand Palestinian experiences so they can resist the dehumanizing messages that are so common in the media.
I loved this book because it tells the entire history of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis through the real-life relationship between one Palestinian refugee and the Israeli woman who was born in the house he was expelled from. The young adult version, based on the adult book, is packed full of details, but all told with nuance from the perspectives of the people involved.
Written by a journalist, the book is easy to follow and interesting. Like in real life, some of the differences are resolved, but most aren’t, leaving the reader interested in learning more.
In 1967, a twenty-five-year-old refugee named Bashir Khairi traveled from the Palestinian hill town of Ramallah to Ramla, Israel, with a goal: to see the beloved stone house with the lemon tree in its backyard that he and his family had been forced to leave nineteen years earlier. When he arrived, he was greeted by one of its new residents: Dalia Eshkenazi Landau, a nineteen-year-old Israeli college student whose family had fled Europe following the Holocaust. She had lived in that house since she was eleven months old. On the stoop of this shared house, Dalia and Bashir began a…
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
This lexicon of the destroyed Palestinian villages of 1948 illustrated to a wide readership the scope and meaning of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. In short installments, a whole history that is wiped out is reconstructed as part of the struggle against denial.
This authoritative reference work describes in detail the more than 400 Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated by Israel in 1948. Little of these once-thriving communities remains: not only have they been erased from the Palestinian landscape, their very names have been removed from contemporary Israeli maps. But to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in their diaspora, these villages were home, and continue to be poignantly powerful symbols of their personal and national identity.
When I was a young adult, I lost someone whom I’d loved intensely. In the aftermath, I experienced a grief that would not subside for more than a year and interfered with my ability to function. This is known as complicated grief. As a result, I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, looking for books that present complicated grief in a humane and understandable manner. While there is a place for self-help books, I’ve found creative literature to be more helpful, especially books written in the first person that offers a metaphorical hand to the reader. I published a detailed essay in Shenandoah on this topic.
This may seem an unconventional pick because it’s a book of poetry. But it’s narrative poetry, and it affects me deeply every time I read it. Mosab Abu Toha is from Gaza, a place saturated in grief, an unending kind of grief where no one ever has the luxury of healing because death follows death follows death, and displacement follows displacement.
The book was published before the most devastating attacks of 2023-2024, and reflects on deaths and destruction from prior bombing campaigns. It repeatedly asks, in the most detailed and profound ways, how to grieve one’s home and homeland, how to process one death after another, and how to remember and hold onto details about people and places when almost every physical remnant is destroyed or displaced.
It also contemplates how to grieve while directly facing one’s own mortality and vulnerability. The first poem, Palestine A-Z, is a 10-page catalog…
Winner of the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press's 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry Finalist
"Written from his native Gaza, Abu Toha's accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."-The New York Times
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have spent my working life as a journalist, author and storyteller, aiming to uncover complexity that sheds new light on stories we think we know. I got my training at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times—and from the wonderful editors of my twelve books. An Innocent Bystander, my book that deals with the Middle East, began as the story of a hijacking and a murder of an American citizen. But as my research widened, I came to see this story couldn’t be told without understanding many perspectives, including the Israeli and the Palestinian, nor could the political be disentangled from the personal.
In novels and non-fiction, Israeli author David Grossman has spent much of his career writing about the failed struggle for peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
This series of essays, written over a period of years, chronicles moments of goodwill and hope on both sides, constantly undermined by sectarian passion and extremist opposition to peace.
In Death as a Way of Life, David Grossman, one of Israel's great fiction writers, addresses urgent questions regarding the middle east in a series of passionate essays and insightful articles.
Writing not only as one of his country's most respected novelists and commentators, but as a husband and father and peace activist bitterly disappointed in the leaders of both sides, Grossman asks: What went wrong after Oslo? How can Israelis and Palestinians make peace? How has the violence changed their lives, and their souls?
