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In The End of Spring, Sahar Khalifeh chronicles the struggle of the Palestinian people with a humane depiction of Palestinian resistance fighters during the 2002 siege of Yasir Arafat’s official headquarters. Khalifeh’s tender and moving portrayal of her protagonists delves into the inner consciences of the men and women and children who were involved in the actual resistance—or were simply caught in the middle. These characters come alive through Khalifeh’s use of Palestinian colloquial diction, as does the setting, through her measured attention to the details of the natural surroundings in which the characters live, fight, and die. The End of Spring is a riveting novel that captures the reader’s attention from beginning to end. It gives a heart and a face to the Palestinian struggle.

A fresh, daring voice in arabic literature today. Alexandra Chreiteh's Ali and his Russian Mother is at once an ordinary and extraordinary story of two young people in Lebanon. At the outbreak of the July War in 2006, the novel's unnamed young protagonist reconnects with her childhood friend and develops a little crush on him, as they flee the bombs unleashed upon their country by Israel. Displaced, along with a million others across the country, she and her Russian mother have joined an evacuation for Russian citizens, when she again meets up with Ali, her former schoolmate from the South, who also has a Russian (Ukrainian) mother. As the two friends reunite, chat, and bond during a harrowing bus caravan across the Syrian border to Lattakia, en route to Moscow, Chreiteh's unique, comic sense of the absurd speaks to contradictions faced by a young generation in Lebanon now, sounding out taboos surrounding gender, sexual, religious, and national identities. Carrying Russian passports like their mothers?both of whom married Lebanese men and settled there?they are forced to reflect upon their choices, and lack of them, in a country that is yet again being torn apart by violent conflict. Like Chreiteh's acclaimed first novel, Always Coca-Cola, this story employs deceptively simple language and style to push the boundaries of what can be talked about in Arabic fiction. Again focused on the preoccupations of young people and their hopes for the future, Ali and his Russian Mother represents a fresh, daring voice in Arabic literature today.