Dreams of Ayn Ara

A dizzying, immersive portrait of a never-ending Nakba, as lived and relived by one displaced Palestinian family.

In Stockholm, Zein al-Abidin shivers, far from the warmth of revolt that simmered all those years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his parents' phone calls. Grandmother Nijmeh struggles to distinguish reality from dreams, and it's left to fearless, level-headed matriarch Zahra to try to keep the family together. But Salwa, with guidance from beyond the grave, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can't go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family's ancestral home in Palestine.

Sara Abou Ghazal's English-language debut traces the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family in the wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. At every turn, their hopes of an ordinary existence are brutally thwarted by false friends, renewed violence, and memories so vivid they refuse to be consigned to the past. Building to a surreal crescendo, Dreams of Ayn Ara maps the cosmic upheaval in which Zionist settler colonialism denies Palestinians not only a homeland, but a future.

Sara Abou Ghazal is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Beirut and now lives in Belgium. Dreams of Ayn Ara is her first novel and English-language debut.

Katharine Halls is a translator of contemporary Arabic literature. Her work has been awarded the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, named finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography and the EBRD Literature Prize, shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for fiction, and longlisted for the Queen Mary Small Press Fiction Prize.