Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Time of White Horses, Ibrahim Nasrallah (Translated by Nancy Roberts) 9789774167577, HOOPOE BD6 for GulfWeekly Book Club members
This superb novel took me three days to read and I begrudged any task that took me away from its captivating pages.
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, it is a thought-provoking detailed insight into the lives of the marginalised, where men are murdered or executed, demolitions and collective punishment handed out and ancestral lands taken at a stroke.
Spanning the collapse of the Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in Palestine, this is the story of three generations of a defiant family from the Palestinian village of Hadiya before 1948.
Through the lives of Mahmud, chief elder of Hadiya, his son Khaled and Khaled’s grandson Naji, we enter the life of a tribe whose fate is decided by one coloniser after another.
Khaled’s remarkable white mare, Hamama, and her descendants share the family’s struggles and as a siege grips Hadiya, it falls to Khaled to attempt to save his people from a descending tyranny.
I wish I had read this book many moons ago - I understand certain things much better now.
