Returning to the Palestinian multigenerational epic format that made her debut novel, Mornings in Jenin (2010), an international bestseller, Susan Abulhawa's haunting Against the Loveless World features another extended Palestinian clan enduring exile, surviving persecution and (sometimes) cheating death.
Abulhawa's compelling protagonist is a woman with four names, each imbued with significant meaning. Born in Kuwait, her 1967 birth certificate identifies her as Yaqoot, chosen by her father without her mother's consent, a nod to the first of his many mistresses. Her mother called her Nahr, meaning river, honoring the River Jordan she crossed while pregnant to escape what would be declared the Six Day War. She was Nanu to her beloved younger brother, for whose education she would later become Almas, meaning diamond, made resistant but valuable. As a middle-aged woman, she's imprisoned in Israel, condemned as a terrorist. Trapped in high-tech solitary confinement, she's secured a pencil, then paper, after a long battle with the guards. "I stare at the blank pages now, trying to tell my story." And so, she begins: "My life returns to me in images, smells, and sounds, but never feelings. I feel nothing." With that detachment in place, Nahr--her preferred moniker "for the purer part of [her]"--reveals a difficult, rebellious life.
Like Nahr, Abulhawa was born in Kuwait in 1967 to Palestinian exiles who fled the Six Day War. Through Nahr, Abulhawa affectingly parallels Palestine's brutal, occupied history during the last half-century, humanizing headlines about people with whom readers can identity, believe, empathize, mourn and ultimately, albeit tentatively, celebrate. --Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon