Mornings in Jenin: a novel

1948. The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Through Amal, the bright granddaughter of the patriarch, we witness the stories of her brothers: one, a stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who, in sacrificing everything for the Palestinian cause, will become his enemy. Amal's own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension, eventually taking her into exile in Pennsylvania. In the first commercial literary work ever to inhabit a Palestinian voice, Susan Abulhawa's is a story of love and loss, of childhood, marriage and parenthood. Richly told and and full of humanity, Mornings in Jenin forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining political conflicts of our lifetime.