The latest addition to my website is Agustina Bessa-Luís‘s A Sibila [The Sibyl]. The novel tells the story of Quina, a Portuguese woman in a male-dominated society. Her father spends his money on women and gets involved in a bitter dispute over water rights which he loses, dying soon after. The cost to the family means the loss a of a dowry for the daughters, which Quina does not regret though her sister does. Quina soon takes charge of he family farm , outmanoeuvring her lazy brothers. Though she is close to her niece and adopts an orphan boy, she never marries and does not have children of ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Margherita Giacobino‘s L’età ridicola (The Ridiculous Age). This novel tells the story of an unnamed elderly woman whio is aware that death is not far away. She lives in an upstairs flat in a city with her also very elderly cat. She has an immigrant carer, Gabriela,. She has a close friend Malvina, whom she sees every day but Malvina has more advanced dementia and when she is scammed her nephew puts her in a home where she gets worse. Our narrator ruminates on death and dying, considering euthanasia and suicide. She sees the world outside getting worse (te ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Diego Marani‘s La città celeste (The Celestial City). This is a humorous, colourful, (semi-)autobiographical account of a young Italian man going to Trieste to study translation and interpreting and his time there. His main motive is to escape his strict, domineering father. However, in his various activities – studying, partying, falling in love, smuggling (Trieste is next to the then Italy-Yugoslavia border), journalism and growing up, he discovers not just Trieste but lots of different Triestes and soon realises that Trieste is not just an Italian city ..read more

I have now read twenty Palestinian novels in a row. Initially I thought I might struggle to find twenty, given that I had already read a few but it was not a problem. Whether it was wise to read twenty Palestinian novels in a row is another matter. All of them, without exception, showed to some degree the sufferings of the Palestinians. A significant number dealt with the various occupations – Ottoman, British and Jewish – and in all cases the Palestinians were clearly the victims, from having their country taken away from them, their land stolen and crops destroyed to rape, imprisonment, murd ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Ahlam Bsharat‘s الاار للناس الغائبين (Trees for the Absentees). This novella follows the story of a young Palestinian woman, Philistia. Her father is in an Israeli jail. She has helped her grandmother who was both a corpse washer and a midwife/baby washer. The grandmother is now dead. Philistia wants to go to university in Nablus and gets a job as a washer/scrubber in the women’s hammam (public baths) where she sees her dead grandmother. She also sees – first in her dreams and then in the streets – Bayrakdar, imaginary to everyone else but very real to her ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Rabai al-Madhoun‘s كونشرتو الهولوكوست والنكبة (رواية، (Fractured Destinies). In this somewhat complicated novel, we start with the death of an Armenian woman, Ivana, who was born and bred in Palestine. She asks her daughter Julie (English father) and Julie’s Palestinian husband, Walid, who has spent most of his life in the UK, to take her ashes back to Palestine but not Acre where she lived, but to Jerusalem. We follow their travels to Palestine and both are very much taken with it and consider moving there. They also meet Jinin, Walid’s cousin, who is liv ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Sahar Mustafah‘s The Beauty of Your Face. This novel is set primarily in the Chicago suburbs. However the heroine, Afaf Rahman, like the author, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants. We follow two alternating stories . The first is Afaf’s story. Her parents did not get on and two key incidents happen in her childhood. After the second her father finds religion (to his wife’s disgust) and regularly attends sessions at the local Islamic centre. Afaf, who as a teenager went somewhat off the rails, joins him and she too becomes very religious. She will go ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Isabella Hammad‘s The Parisian. Midhat Kamal lost his mother when he was two. When his father remarries, Midhat is sent off to a French school in Constantinople and then to study medicine in Montpellier. Things do not go well there, partially because he falls in love with his landlord’s daughter, and he moves to Paris, nominally to study history. though he befriends many of those involved in the fight for Arab independence after World War I. He becomes a dapper Parisian but has to return home when his money runs out. To his annoyance his father expects him ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Ibrahim Fawal‘s On the Hills of God. This tells the story of Ardallah, an idyllic Palestinian town and its inhabitants, focussing on Yousif Safi, aged seventeen, still at school at the start of the novel, only son of the well-off and well-respected local doctor. The novel opens in June 1947 and we follow the gradual incursions of the Zionists, as well as the UN decision to partition the country when the British mandate ends. Yousif is reluctant to fight, favouring negotiation while his father refuses to release the hospital fund so that the town can buy ar ..read more

The latest addition to my website is Mahmoud Shukair‘s لقدس و حدها هناك (Jerusalem Stands Alone). This is a series of closely linked (very) short stories telling the stories of a Palestinian family, the unamed Palestinian narrator, a few other linked characters and the city of Jerusalem, a key character in this book. Our family (father, mother, two daughters and two absent sons, one in prison and a French woman tenant ) have no documents proving their ownership and when five bearded, armed Jews move in next door, they start to worry. Our narrator starts an affair with one of the daughters, al ..read more