Халифа Сахр — новинки

This award-winning novel is at once a re-casting of the story of the Holy Family, an ode to Arab Jerusalem, and a call for liberation, not just of a nation but for the individual women and men who inhabit it. After abandoning his beloved Mariam when she falls pregnant, and escaping her brothers' bullets, Ibrahim abandons his own ideals and dreams of becoming a novelist, opting instead to follow his father's wishes and seek wealth and commercial success abroad. Thirty years later, lonely and disillusioned, Ibrahim returns to Ramallah to retrace the past he tried to leave behind. He sets out on a long and frustrating quest to track down Mariam, which takes him from the West Bank to Israel. Along the way he encounters his son, Michael, a young man with spiritual powers that enable him to see what is unknown and find what has gone missing. Moving and lyrical, Khalifeh's novel weaves religious and political symbolism into a story of love and loss. At its core is Ibrahim's--the Palestinian's--agonizing but unrelenting search for a home.

Wild Thorns ($12.95 paperback original; Jan.; 208 pp.; 1-56656-336-4). An earnest Arabic novel, first published in 1976, that dramatizes the reactions of Palestinian nationalists to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, an action that has turned many of their countrymen into nomads dutifully commuting to alien territory to work ( . . . the people had become soft, been brainwashed with lies and Israeli cash). Khalifehs initial focus on Usama, a young Palestinian returned home to find his relatives compromised in this way, yields to more diffused depictions of several other characters with whom he finds himself conspiring to blow up buses transporting day-workers. The conspiracy raises havoc with the storys formal unity but does enable it to portray credibly a troubling spectrum of understandably extreme responses to disenfranchisement and oppression.