Bøker av Sahar Khalifeh

A deeply poetic account of love and resistance through a young girls eyes by acclaimed writer, Sahar Khalifeh, called the Virginia Woolf of Palestinian literature (Brsenblatt)Nidal, after many decades of restless exile, returns to her family home in Nablus, where she had lived with her grandmother before the 1948 Nakba that scattered her family across the globe. She was a young girl when the popular resistance began and, through the bloodshed and bitter struggle, Nidal fell in love with freedom fighter Rabie. He was her first and only real lovehim and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land.Many years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amins memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers the secret history of her absent mother.Filled with emotional urgency and political immediacy, Sahar Khalifeh spins an epic tale reaching from the final days of the British Mandate to today with clear-eyed realism and great imagination.

Wild Thorns is a chronicle of life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Written in Arabic and first published in Jerusalem in 1976, Wild Thorns, with its panorama of characters and unsentimental portrayals of everyday life, is the first Arab novel to give a true picture of social and personal relations under occupation. Its convincing sincerity, uncompromising honesty, and rich emotional texture plead elegantly for the cause of survival in the face of oppression.

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.