Fiction
Mornings in Jenin
Susan Abulhawa
Palestine 1941. In the small village of Ein Hod a father leads a procession of his family and workers through the olive groves. As they move through the trees the green fruits drop onto the orchid floor; the ancient cycle of the seasons providing another bountiful harvest.
Palestine 1948. The Abuheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin.
Through Amal, the bright granddaughter of the patriarch, we witness the stories of her brothers: one stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who in sacrificing everything for the Palestinian cause will become his enemy. Amal’s own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension.
Birds Without Wings
Louis De Bernieres
The Early Hours
A Novel by Marmaduke Picthall
Foreword by Abdal Hakim Murad
Set in the dramatic last days of the Ottoman Empire, this novel of love and bloodshed depicts a world trapped between Islam and the modern age. Camruddin is a simple Madedonian soldier caught up in the Young Turk conspiracy to overthrow the Sultan. A romance with a girl from a Pasha’s harem presents him with a desperate choice: to join the Jihad in the Balkan hills, or to enjoy his love and the patronage of a high Imperial official. The collapse of old Turkey, amid intimations of the birth of a new nation, is brilliantly depicted, as the humour and the good-natured nobility of the Ottoman establishment totters under the hammer-blows of invasion and internal revolt.
