A Curious Land: Stories from Home

“A Curious Land” by Susan Muaddi Darraj is a collection of short stories about the inhabitants of Tel Al-Hilou, which is a small Palestinian village in the West Bank. Spanning generations, and continents, the stories explore aspects of the Palestinian narrative through the lived experiences of characters in the book.

Darraj writes nine different stories set in different periods of Palestinian history. The book opens with a tale of a group of Bedouin refugees fleeing violence during the 1916 famine which wreaked havoc across the Levant during the First World War. It ends with a story set in 1998 about Adlah, the daughter of one of the heroines of the 1987 Intifada, who returns to Tel Al-Hilou from her comfortable home in America.

Though there are no apparent connections between the multiple stories and the different characters in them, other than their ties to Tel Al-Hilou, they are masterfully linked as the tales intertwine and overlap in unexpected ways over the course of several generations.

This book has been shortlisted for the Palestine Book awards 2016, please click here to read the full review on the Palestine book awards site.