Now a major motion picture from award-winning director Eran Kolirin

In his searing new novel, the young Arab-Israeli writer Sayed Kashua introduces a disillusioned journalist who returns to his hometown, an Arab village within Israel, hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin. But the prodigal son returns to a place where the people are petty and provincial and everything is smaller than he remembers. When Israeli tanks surround the village without explanation, the community devolves into a Darwinian jungle, and the journalist and his family must negotiate the fault lines of a world on the brink of implosion. With the enduring moral and literary power of Albert Camus and George Orwell, Let It Be Morning proves Sayed Kashua to be a fearless, prophetic observer of a political and human quagmire that offers no easy answers.

A bildüngsroman suffused with humor and irony, Dancing Arabs centers on a young boy from a poor Arab village, his haphazard receipt of a scholarship to a Jewish boarding school, and the dislocation and alienation that ensues when he finds himself faced with the impossible: the imperative to straddle two famously incompatible worlds.

As a child, our nameless narrator/antihero lives with his family in his grandmother's house. His grandmother and father constantly impress upon him the significance of their land: when so many people fled or sold theirs away, they held strong. Better to die fighting for your land than to give it away.
Every night after his brothers fall asleep, he climbs into bed with his grandmother, his main source of comfort and protection. One night she tells him where the key to her secret cupboard are, and if she should die, he must find all the death equipment in the blue bag. Paranoid from then on, he races home every day at recess to see if she's died. One day he gets there and she is not there, so he unlocks the cupboard and pulls out the box. All he finds are towels and some soaps from Mecca, but then he notices his father's photo in the old newspaper lining the suitcase, and some postcards in his father's handwriting. At his urging, his grandmother tells him about the newspaper clippings: his father was always the handsomest and the smartest in Tira, until he was thrown in jail for his political activity (eg: bombing a school cafeteria). The grandmother visited her son every week, wrote letters to the mayor, anyone who might be able to help her son. When he was released years later, he remained politically active, revering the Egyptian president Nasser, and for a time, joined the communist party.

The young narrator is nothing like his father, who doesn't understand how my brothers and I came out the way we did. We can't even draw a flag. He says kids smaller than us walk through the streets singing 'P-L-O----Israel NO!' and he shouts at us for not even knowing what PLO stands for. Not at all politically motivated, the boy knows nothing of national identity; he simply wants to get through the school day without getting smacked by his teacher.

He excels at school and his family dreams that by the time he graduates, they will have their own state and he will become a pilot, or a judge. One day the principal tells him the Jews are opening a school for gifted students and they will be admitting a few Arab kids too. He is accepted and his father whoops with joy-this will mean a better life for his son and his whole family.

His transition at school is very rough. The other students make fun of how he speaks and eats. On a bus home to Tira during his first school break, he is singled out and pulled off the bus by some soldiers. Humiliated, he proceeds on his journey home, but gets off of two more buses fearing that he will be questioned again. He winds up at Ben Gurion airport where his father has to come get him. He cries the whole way home and says he is never going back. His father mocks his tears and his weakness and tells him he has no choice-this is his only chance to escape the limitations of life in Tira. (The tug of war between father and son continues throughout the novel, the father putting his hopes and aspirations onto his son, as well as his defeats and disappointments.)

He goes back to school, but only after deciding that he will never be identified as an Arab again. He becomes an expert at assuming false identities: he shaves off his moustache, learns how to pronounce Hebrew like the Jews, buys new clothes, starts listening to only Hebrew music. Soon he falls in love with Naomi, one of his Jewish classmates. On Memorial Day for the Fallen Soldiers, the narrator does not stand up during the moment of silence, and Naomi, whose father had died in action, refuses to speak to him. Eventually, Naomi admits that she loves him too, and for a while, they are together in spite of their differences. She initiates him into a new world of movie theatres and restaurants, and for the first time he learns that Zionism is an ideology, not a swear word; that his aunt is called a refugee; that Arabs in Israel are called a minority; he learns the meaning of both national homeland, and anti-semitism.

As the end of his final term draws near, he is constantly tired and dizzy, cannot sleep or eat. He knows that he and Naomi will have to break up when school ends. He takes a bottle of pills the night before a big exam, and winds up in the hospital. His father comes and blames it on that Jewish whore. After a short convalescence, he finds himself at Hebrew University. He trails Naomi at school, but she avoids him. He stops going to class-he uses his unlimited bus pass to travel the streets of Jerusalem for hours listening to his walkman. This is how he meets Samia, an Arab student who asks him the way to Hadassah hospital one day; he takes her there himself and they areeeeee a couple from then on. Four years later he decides it is time for them to marry. He and his wife are both Israeli citizens and know Hebrew well, but the narrator, a lost son, has no place to go back to after having been exposed to the tempting Israeli experience from which he is barred. He and his wife move to Beit Tsefafa, an Arab neighborhood where they don't know anyone. Soon the second intifada begins to rage-the narrator refers to it as the war. He begins drinking heavily. He blames his father for his optimism, his faith that it will all turn out well for them, that his going to the boarding school would make a difference.

His aimlessness and self-loathing deepen and spiral: he grows apart from his wife, he drinks, fantasizes about taking a lover, and is preoccupied with all his failures. Through his self-destructive haze, he decides he will make everything right-he and his wife will sleep together peacefully, like spoons, he'll give up drinking, he'll start praying

Part comedy of manners, part psychological mystery . . . Issues of nationalism, religion, and passing collide with quickly changing social and sexual mores. --Boston Globe

From one of the most important contemporary voices to emerge from the Middle East comes a gripping tale of love and betrayal, honesty and artifice, which asks whether it is possible to truly reinvent ourselves, to shed our old skin and start anew.

Second Person Singular follows two men, a successful Arab criminal attorney and a social worker-turned-artist, whose lives intersect under the most curious of circumstances. The lawyer has a thriving practice in the Jewish part of Jerusalem, a large house, a Mercedes, speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, and is in love with his wife and two young children. In an effort to uphold his image as a sophisticated Israeli Arab, he often makes weekly visits to a local bookstore to pick up popular novels. On one fateful evening, he decides to buy a used copy of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata, a book his wife once recommended. To his surprise, inside he finds a small white note, a love letter, in Arabic, in her handwriting. I waited for you, but you didn't come. I hope everything's all right. I wanted to thank you for last night. It was wonderful. Call me tomorrow? Consumed with suspicion and jealousy, the lawyer slips into a blind rage over the presumed betrayal. He first considers murder, revenge, then divorce, but when the initial sting of humiliation and hurt dissipates, he decides to hunt for the book's previous owner--a man named Yonatan, a man who is not easy to track down, whose identity is more complex than imagined, and whose life is more closely aligned with his own than expected. In the process of dredging up old ghosts and secrets, the lawyer tears the string that holds all of their lives together.

A Palestinian who writes in Hebrew, Sayed Kashua defies classification and breaks through cultural barriers. He communicates, with enormous emotional power and a keen sense of the absurd, the particular alienation and the psychic costs of people struggling to straddle two worlds. Second Person Singular is a deliciously complex psychological mystery and a searing dissection of the individuals that comprise a divided society.

Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society. An Israeli-Palestinian who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing in Hebrew with the hope of creating one story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather than two that cannot coexist. He devoted his novels and his satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to exploring the contradictions of modern Israel while also capturing the nuances of family life in all its tenderness and chaos.

Over the last decade, Kashua's humorous essays have been among the most widely read columns in Israel. He writes about fatherhood and marriage, the Jewish-Arab conflict, encounters with prejudice, his professional ambitions, and his love of literature. With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and a razor-sharp ironic wit, he has documented his own life as well as that of society at large--from instructing his daughter on when it's appropriate to speak Arabic (everywhere, anytime, except at the entrance to a mall) to navigating security at Ben Gurion airport (in a Citroen that he'd bought especially for checkpoints: God in heaven, who ever saw an Arab driving a Citroen?) to opening a Facebook account during the Arab Spring (so that he wouldn't miss the next revolution).

From these events of his everyday life, Kashua brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. Amusing and sincere, Native--a selection of his popular columns--is comprised of unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful personal dispatches.

Hailed as an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novel Track Changes which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity.

Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family's side. But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever.

Sitting by his father's hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children--all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.

Track Changes is a stunningly original, poignant, and captivating exploration of alienation, love, country, and memory by one of the most important writers at work today.

Sayed Kashua has been praised by the New York Times as a master of subtle nuance in dealing with both Arab and Jewish society. An Arab-Israeli who lived in Jerusalem for most of his life, Kashua started writing with the hope of creating one story that both Palestinians and Israelis could relate to, rather than two that cannot coexist together. He devoted his novels and his satirical weekly column published in Haaretz to telling the Palestinian story and exploring the contradictions of modern Israel, while also capturing the nuances of everyday family life in all its tenderness and chaos.

With an intimate tone fueled by deep-seated apprehension and razor-sharp ironic wit, Kashua has been documenting his own life as well as that of society at large: he writes about his children's upbringing and encounters with racism, about fatherhood and married life, the Jewish-Arab conflict, his professional ambitions, travels around the world as an author, and--more than anything--his love of books and literature. He brings forth a series of brilliant, caustic, wry, and fearless reflections on social and cultural dynamics as experienced by someone who straddles two societies. Written between 2006 and 2014, Native reads like an unrestrained, profoundly thoughtful personal journal.

Hailed as an unusually gifted storyteller with exceptional insight (Jewish Tribune), Bernstein award-winning writer Sayed Kashua presents his masterful fourth novel Track Changes which follows an Arab-Israeli man as he reckons with the weight of his past, his memories, and his cultural identity.

Having emigrated to America years before, a nameless memoirist now residing in Illinois receives word that his estranged father, whom he has not spoken to in fourteen years, is dying. Leaving his wife and their three children, he returns to Jerusalem and to his hometown of Tira in Palestine to be by his family's side. But few are happy to see him back and, geographically and emotionally displaced, he feels more alienated from his life than ever.

Sitting by his father's hospital bed, the memoirist begins to remember long-buried traumas, the root causes of his fallout with his family, the catalyst for his marriage and its recent dissolution, and his strained relationships with his children--all of which is strangely linked to a short story he published years ago about a young girl named Palestine. As he plunges deeper into his memory and recounts the history of his land and his love, the lines between truth and lies, fact and fiction become increasingly blurred.

Track Changes is a stunningly original, poignant, and captivating exploration of alienation, love, country, and memory by one of the most important writers at work today.