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palestinian book recs
97
items literature that gives insights into the culture, history, and resilience of palestine and its people and provide a vital understanding of palestine’s past and present
Sections
6
fiction
nonfiction/factual
poetry
essays/memoirs
short stories
cartoons
fiction
this one broke my heart. novella split into two parts; the first takes place in 1949, when israeli soldiers capture and rape a young palestinian girl. second part takes place in the present day, when a young woman in becomes obsessed with learning mo...
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
isra is a young mother who finds herself in an abusive arranged marriage far from her home country, palestine. years later, deya, her daughter, is a teenager growing up in modern-day brooklyn
A Woman Is No Man by Etaf Rum
yara is a palestinian-american woman trying to figure out how to balance her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and a working woman. after growing up in a conservative household where tensions often ran high, she feels that she is finally free from ...
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
coming-of-age novel about a young palestinian american woman who struggles with her identity as she navigates her cultural, religious, and sexual identities
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
follows three generations of a palestinian family and asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can't go home again
Salt Houses by Hala Alyan
a palestinian american woman wrestles with faith, loss, and identity before coming face-to-face with a school shooter in this searing debut
The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah
the unlikely friendship between two fathers, one israeli and one palestinian, who come together after the loss of their daughters
Apeirogon by Colum McCann
follows a young arab-israeli journalist who returns to his hometown, an arab village within israel, after being discriminated against by his jewish neighbors and colleagues
Let It Be Morning by Sayed Kashua and Miriam Shlesinger
a writer who lives in illinois with his family returns to his hometown, an arab village in israel, to visit his dying father whom he has not spoken to in over a decade
Track Changes by Sayed Kashua
a palestinian israeli teenager is admitted to an elite school in jerusalem. explores his lifelong struggle between his pride in his palestinian identity and the desire to be a part of israeli society
Dancing Arabs by Sayed Kashua
A stunning rendering of present-day palestine. a story of diaspora, displacement, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
a bold and unabashed novel about a young palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at an nyc middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
a sweeping and lyrical novel that follows a young palestinian refugee as she slowly becomes radicalized while searching for a better life for her family
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
Nur, a young Palestinian refugee from a camp near Ramallah, is often mistaken for an Ashkenazi Jew. He dreams of freedom beyond the fences of the camp--and of writing a novel. When he discovers an Israeli ID card in the pocket of a secondhand coat, h...
A Mask the Color of the Sky by Bassem Khandaqji
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families, Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and...
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
Coming from a moderately traditional Muslim family, Samira Abdel-Aziz has endured her fair share of arranged matches. The truth is, Samira is already experiencing enough wedding drama as an assistant at Bridal Bazaar magazine and as a gofer for her s...
Courting Samira by Amal Awad
Hannah is a journalist running on empty. Balancing the chaos of new motherhood, her job and her faith, she increasingly feels the judgement of a newsroom that doesn’t value her voice. Ashraf is an academic whose career and personal life are in freefa...
Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Mornings in Jenin is a heart-wrenching multi-generational account of one family's struggle and survival through the decades before and after Zionist colonization and theft of Palestine. Carrying us from Ein Hod to Jenin to Jerusalem, to Lebanon, then...
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
Based on the true story of two Jaffa teenagers, Mother of Strangers follows the daily lives of Subhi, a fifteen-year-old mechanic, and Shams, the thirteen-year-old student he hopes to marry one day. With a thriving orange export business, Jaffa had a...
Mother of Strangers by Suad Amiry
The sudden death of Hassan at the hands of an Israeli shakes his friends Aziz and Mustafa to their core, leaving them grappling with grief, guilt, and an uncertain future. Drawn into the orbit of Hassan’s father—a respected community leader known for...
Seven Heavens Away by Ashraf Zaghal
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 Isr...
The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem
In this stunning portrait of Palestinian life before the Nakba, a young man gains renown as a magician of a revolutionary sort—meanwhile evading the British colonialist forces who seek to destroy him and the resistance he represents.
The Lord by Soraya Antonius
Follows the story of 22-year-old Kan'an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan'an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifi...
The Trinity of Fundamentals by Wisam Refeedie
nonfiction/factual
the author describes the zionist claim to palestine in the century spanning 1917–2017 as late settler colonialism and an instrument of british and then later american imperialism, doing so by focusing on a series of six major episodes the author char...
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the united states and that in palestine, and beyond
Palestine: A Socialist Introduction by Brian Bean and Sumaya Awad
focusing on key junctures, Erakat shows how the strategic deployment of law has shaped current conditions. over the past century, the law has done more to advance Israel's interests than the palestinians'. but this outcome was never inevitable
Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine by Noura Erakat
exploration of the political space created by israel’s colonial occupation by unraveling the mechanisms of control and its transformation of the occupied territories into a theoretically constructed artifice
Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation by Eyal Weizman
thoughtful and incisive analysis of how progressive commitments to racial and social justice are undermined by the 'palestinian exception'.
Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick
surveys the fallout from Israel's conduct in gaza and place it into the context of israel's longstanding occupation of palestine
Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the Us-Israeli War Against the Palestinians by Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky
discusses the road ahead for palestinians and how the international community can pressure israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of palestine.
On Palestine by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, and Frank Barat
illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Frank Barat
A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedge...
A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine by Chris Hedges
In Peter Beinart’s view, one story dominates Jewish communal life: that of persecution and victimhood. It is a story that erases much of the nuance of Jewish religious tradition and warps our understanding of Israel and Palestine. After Gaza, where J...
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart
Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious acad...
Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question
A sharp critique of the Oslo surrender, the Bantustans created by imperialism in the name of a two-state solution, and a recognition that the tokenisation of the Palestinian struggle and emancipation have become ordinary conduct on the part of organi...
Decolonising the Palestinian Mind by Haidar Eid
In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and wo...
Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability by Eyal Weizman
Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G. Finkelstein's new book presents a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza's martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions co...
Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom by Norman Finkelstein
The world's leading forensic scholar exposes international duplicity and complicity in the Gaza genocide.
Gaza's Gravediggers: An Inquiry Into Corruption in High Places by Norman Finkelstein
Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern
Norman G. Finkelstein sets out in this concise, paradigm-shifting new book, a closer examination of Israel's motives reveals a state whose repeated recourse to savage war is far from irrational. Rather, Israel's attacks have been designed to sabotage...
Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza by Norman Finkelstein
Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral...
Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza by Didier Fassin
incredible and heartbreaking
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppresse...
Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd
With this book, Sa'ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestini...
Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa'ed Atshan
Nine days before October 7, 2023, award-winning author Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. The text of Hammad's seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a...
Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad
Malm unearths the shared roots of colonial adventurism in Palestine and fossil fuelled warfare.
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth by Andreas Malm
Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive arc...
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World by Antony Loewenstein
poetry
poetry examining the violence, racism, politics, and culture of the middle east
Born Palestinian, Born Black & the Gaza Suite by Suheir Hammad
a meditation on the state of world affairs, with special attention paid to the current hardships faced by palestinians near and within the west bank and gaza strip
The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye
collection of poetry about El-Kurd's grandmother, Rifqa, who was a symbol of palestinian resilience tracing Rifqa's exile from Haifa to the dispossession of El-Kurd's family in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem
Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd and Aja Monet
Candy Royalle was a spoken word poet par excellence, presenting her words and ideas with dynamism and passion. In a short 37 years of life she made a profound impact on readers and audiences. Her death unleashed sorrow and love. Candy's anticipation ...
A Trillion Tiny Awakenings by Candy Royalle
my dear friend's poetry collection
Aerie Tales by Sondos Al-Saqqa
Affiliation by Mira Mattar: a stunning new sequence of letters and poems exploring gender, family, religion, war, ecology, colonialism and love in Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine and the United Kingdom.
Affiliation by Mira Mattar
Recent work by Palestinian poets & actions you can take to stop genocide now.
And Still We Write
Blending poetry and memoir, the book explores intergenerational displacement, and speaks the truths of a woman who loses her innocence at a young age due to cultural inequity. Through the painful knocks of colonization, Zaynab Mohammed finds her free...
Are You Listening?: Weaving a Tapestry from Pain Into Beauty by Zaynab Mohammed
What is political poetry? How does history become lived experience? What does it mean to bear witness through writing?
Noor Hindi's poems explore colonialism, religion, patriarchy and everything in between with sharp wit and innovative precision. Lay...
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. by Noor Hindi
Mohja Kahf blends the experiences of recent Arab-American immigrants into contemporary American scenery. In her poems, Muslim ritual and Qur'anic vocabulary move in next door to the idiom of suburban Americana, and the legendary Scheherazad of the Th...
E-mails from Scheherazad by Mohja Kahf
Through seventeen powerful testimonies, Ever Since I Did Not Die vividly depicts what it means to live through war. Exquisitely weaving the past with the present and fond memories with brutal realities, this volume celebrates resistance through words...
Ever Since I Did Not Die by Ramy Al-Asheq
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha's po...
Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha
my sweet friend's second poetry collection
The Heart's Gaze by Sondos Al-Saqqa
Geographies of Light is a voice of the Palestinian people, bearing witness to brutal loss, as well as the joy.
Geographies of Light by Lisa Suhair Majaj
The central matter of this daring new collection is the story of Hagar, Abraham, and Sarah--the ancestral feuding family of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
These poems delve into the Hajar story in Islam. They explore other figures from the Near E...
Hagar Poems by Mohja Kahf
Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry
Nima wishes she were someone else. She doesn’t feel understood by her mother, who grew up in a different land. She doesn’t feel accepted in her suburban town; yet somehow, she isn't different enough to belong elsewhere. Her best friend, Haitham, is t...
Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo
The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputatio...
If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer
Matuk's meditations on place and power offer experiments in self-understanding, moving through expansive conversations between a lyric "I" and others, including poets, the speaker's partner, ancestors, and the reader, and creating spaces for strange ...
Moon Mirrored Indivisible by Farid Matuk
My Voice Sought the Wind represents five years of Abulhawa’s best poems on the timeless themes of love, loss, identity, and family, brought to life through her vivid observations and intimate personal reflections. She writes from her own experience, ...
My Voice Sought the Wind by Susan Abulhawa
It compiles essays, short stories, poetry, interviews, and visual art to tell the story of how the vast web of Palestinian histories has been severed from its roots.
Palestine has always been a precious patchwork of languages, ethnicities, cultures,...
Naseej: Life-Weavings of Palestine
Non-Essential Work by Omar Sakr
Rock Flight by Hasib Hourani
Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
Thirteen Departures from the Moon by Deema K Shehabi
essays/memoirs
explores through ten innovative essays new insights into ways of understanding and building solidarities with palestine
Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities with Palestine by Mahdi Sabbagh, Yasmin El-Rifae, Keller Easterling, et al.
by me and my dear friend:) also available from foyles and waterstone
Dear Sondos by Sondos Al-Saqqa and DNL
a subtle psychological portrait of the author’s relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for palestinian human rights
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh
in this urgent, insightful essay, a respected historian places the israeli-palestinian war in context, challenging western attitudes about the region.
Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso
A River Dies of Thirst by Mahmoud Darwish
Diary of a Young Doctor: Notes from the Genocide in Gaza by Dr Ezzideen Shehab
Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine
In My Mother's Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home by Mona Hajjar Halaby
The Eyes of Gaza: A Diary of Resilience by Plestia Alaqad
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra
They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza's Youth
You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times by Saeed Teebi
short stories
drawn from her experiences of growing up as a young woman in the ‘world’s largest prison’—gaza—qarmout’s stories stitch together a stirring patchwork of perspectives exploring what it means to be a palestinian today
The Sea Cloak & Other Stories by Nayrouz Qarmout
11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exiles
Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi
Mother Country by Etaf Rum
Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction