The release date for the English version of 'Mornings in Jenin' by
Susan Abulhawa is Feb 2010. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
An very emotional and well-written book that has the potential to recreate for Palestine what The Kite Runner achieved for Afghanistan.
The Abulhejas are forcibly relocated to the Jenin refugee camp after being driven from the historic town of Ein Hod by the newly established state of Israel in 1948. Exiled from his beloved olive orchards, the patriarch of the family suffers from heartbreak, his oldest son starts a family but is shot by an Israeli soldier, and his grandkids fight against misfortune in search of freedom, peace, and a place to call home. This is the tale of the Palestinian people as it has never been told before, across four generations of one family.
Life itself is accelerated in the camps by the extreme precariousness of living there. Amal, the intelligent granddaughter of the patriarch, knows this for sure as she experiences the delights of childhood friendship and her first love, and particularly when she loses her beloved father who read to her every day in the calm of the early morning. The tales of Amal's twin brothers—one raised Jewish after being abducted by an Israeli soldier and the other giving his life in defense of the Palestinian cause—come to us via Amal. Between the main Israeli-Palestinian conflicts over the course of three decades, Amal's own tragic journey weaves together themes of love and loss, childhood, marriage, and parenting, and ultimately, the need of sharing her past with her daughter in order to preserve the greatest love of her life.
Mornings in Jenin's profound and poignant humanism compels us to reconsider one of the key political struggles of our day.