Description
By (author) Serhan, Mai
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A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit
“[A] definitive work in the genre of Palestinian memoirs that will not only attract readers of Said or Kanafani, but also fans of Joan Didion, Hisham Matar, Ocean Vuong, or James Baldwin.” —The New Arab
“Serhan’s memoir, crafted in magnificent prose. . . . is something which is truly cinematic in quality, whose delights and heartbreaks tumble out before the reader as naturally as images fall from a screen. . . . utterly vivid and compelling.” —Jhalak Review
Mai Serhan lives in Cairo and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her family was expelled in 1948. She is twenty-four years old when one morning she receives a phone call from her estranged father. His health is failing and he might not have long to live, so he asks her to join him in China where he runs a business empire about which Mai knows nothing. Mai agrees to go in the hopes that they will become close, but this strange new country is as unknowable to her as her father. There, the ghosts of the Nakba come to haunt them both. With this grief comes violence, and a tragic death brings a whole new meaning to the word erasure.
In a narrative made rich by its layers of fragmentation, as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this courageous memoir spans Egypt, Lebanon, Dubai, China and, of course, Palestine. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss and woven through with an understated humor and much grace.
Review quote:
“[A] definitive work in the genre of Palestinian memoirs that will not only attract readers of Said or Kanafani, but also fans of Joan Didion, Hisham Matar, Ocean Vuong, or James Baldwin.” —The New Arab
“The book evokes the sensory joy of pre-Nakba Acre – food, landscape, community. . . . This is also very much a book about being a daughter, and about being a woman.”—The London Magazine
“Serhan’s memoir, crafted in magnificent prose. . . . is something which is truly cinematic in quality, whose delights and heartbreaks tumble out before the reader as naturally as images fall from a screen. . . . utterly vivid and compelling.” —Jhalak Review
“A courageous memoir of exile over generations”—The Bookseller
“Weaving together themes of sickness, statelessness, and intergenerational trauma with poignant, understated humor and grace, Serhan’s story moves through pre-1948 Palestine, modern day Cairo, and China at the brink of globalization. At each point, she navigates a world fraught with heartbreak, loss, and the innate human drive to hold onto our families, even long after they’ve fallen apart.”—Najla Said, author of Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family
“Mai Serhan”s writing is unique, sincere, dark, funny and cuttingly tragic. Her memoir will stay with me for a long time. There are facets of Palestinian-ness — if you can define it as such a thing — that are so clearly identifiable to me and yet so rare to see in literature.”—Selma Dabbagh,author of Out of It and editor of We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers
“To accompany Mai Serhan across the times and spaces of injury and dispossession, to bear the pain of limbs and land lost, to weather the impossibility of return, to excavate the depths of all that we have and all that we have lost, is a salve on the open wound of what it means to be Palestinian. This brave and beautiful book is a gift and an invitation,
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