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Cover of Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa

Against the Loveless World

  • 384 pages · about 6 hours
  • First published 2020
  • 8 editions

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1 About this book

In this “beautiful...urgent” novel (The New York Times), Nahr, a young Palestinian woman, fights for a better life for her family as she travels as a refugee throughout the Middle East.

As Nahr sits, locked away in solitary confinement, she spends her days reflecting on the dramatic events that landed her in prison in a country she barely knows. Born in Kuwait in the 70s to Palestinian refugees, she dreamed of falling in love with the perfect man, raising children, and possibly opening her own beauty salon. Instead, the man she thinks she loves jilts her after a brief marriage, her family teeters on the brink of poverty, she’s forced to prostitute herself, and the US invasion of Iraq makes her a refugee, as her parents had been. After trekking through another temporary home in Jordan, she lands in Palestine, where she finally makes a home, falls in love, and her destiny unfolds under Israeli occupation.

  • Political
  • Middle east
  • Palestinian Arab Refugees
  • Arab-Israeli conflict
  • Survival
  • Politics and government
  • Israel-Arab conflicts
  • Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks

2 About Susan Abulhawa

Born 1967

Susan Abulhawa (Arabic: سوزان أبو الهوى; born 1970) is a Palestinian-American writer, and activist. She wrote the novels Mornings in Jenin, The Blue Between Sky and Water (2015), and Against the Loveless World (2020). She founded the children's organization Playgrounds for Palestine.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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