You were dead, Sarah, you were dead. In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure--and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create nation and history. Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

Gaza has always been rebellious... stubborn, addictive. I'm her daughter, and I look like her.

Born in Rafah, raised in Gaza, subjected both to Israeli bombs and to Islamist tyranny, and in the face of prison, death threats, abuse, misogyny, violence, and repression, Asmaa al-Ghoul has continued to speak her truth. She has continued to live and to love, to laugh and to protest. In this moving memoir of growing up Gaza with a hunger for freedom and a passionate attachment to the places she calls home, journalist, writer, and activist, al-Ghoul recounts her lifelong resistance to religious fanaticism, state sponsored violence, and all forms of repression and subjugation. Al-Ghoul has been called too strong minded, criticized for not covering her hair, derided for ignoring warnings and speaking out against injustice. Her pure, clarion voice is raised wholly in support of dialogue, peace, love, and honesty.

Nothing, it seems, can stop her.

Offering an intimate look into life, politics, and survival in Gaza in recent years, al-Ghoul's A Rebel in Gaza offers readers a nuanced and singular perspective on the current conflict.

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

[A] kind of prose poem...that recalls the memoirs of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish--New York Times

Fierce and lyrical . . . a devastating testament to the power of hope, and of its loss.--Claire Messud

One of more than 5,000 Palestinians held in Israeli prisons before October 7, 2023, Nasser Abu Srour was sentenced to life without parole in 1993 after a forced confession. His extraordinary writings delve into the history of the Nakba to the Intifada of the Stones, as he navigates life within the confines of an Israeli prison.

But it is within the walls of his cell that this exceptional memoir takes an unexpected direction--Abu Srour turns the very Wall that has deprived him of freedom into his companion, his interlocutor. It becomes the source of stability that allows him to endure a chaotic, hopeless existence. The limitations of this survival strategy--and singular literary device--become painfully evident when falling in love causes Abu Srour to lose his grip on the Wall.

Only by writing the story of his imprisonment and the story of his love does Abu Srour find his way back. In doing so, he has created a work of art that transcends his pain while shining a glaring light on the ongoing tragedy of the Palestinian situation.

From Time 100 honoree Saad Mohseni, the deeply moving and surprising story of the attempt to build a truly independent media company in contemporary Afghanistan.

Saad Mohseni, chairman and CEO of Moby Group, Afghanistan's largest media company, charts a twenty-year effort to bring a free press to his country after years of Taliban rule, and how that effort persists even after the Taliban's return to power in 2021.

In the heady early days of the American occupation, Mohseni returns to Kabul which he had last seen as a child before the Soviet invasion. Casting about for ways to be involved in the dawn of a new Afghanistan, Mohseni makes what seems like a quixotic decision to leave the comforts of a career in international banking to start a Kabul radio station with his three siblings. This unlikely venture quickly blossoms into a burgeoning television empire, bringing Mohseni and his family and employees into sometimes uncomfortable contact with everyone who has a stake in the country--from the government of Hamid Karzai to White House officials. Moreover, their radio and television networks soon become a necessary beacon for millions of Afghans, who rely on them not just for independent news but for joyful pleasures like soap operas and Afghan Star, a beloved national singing competition in a country whose previous rulers had banned (and would again ban) music.

Mohseni's position at Moby affords him unique insights into this extraordinary yet troubled country, the youngest in the world outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, and his powerful account captures the spirit and resilience of the Afghan people--notably the hundreds of men and women still working in Moby's Kabul office today, who, once again under Taliban rule, create programs, report the news, and educate the public.

Radio Free Afghanistan is a stunning, vibrant portrait of a nation in turmoil, poised between despair and hope.

The contrast between how the West views newcomers versus how immigrants picture themselves is stark. New residents in Canada and the US are often misunderstood, disrespected, or poorly labeled due to inaccurate assumptions and stereotypes held by all parties. What does it take to attend university in a second or third language? What are the common denominators amongst people arriving in the West wanting to pursue the American dream? What are the impacts of cultural and social adjustments, academic and professional advancement? How do new Canadians and Americans maneuver through prejudices and discrimination coming from not only those born on western soil but also from other immigrants?

My Silver Lining, volume three of a three-volume memoir, is a window into the hurdles that settlers face and the support they get from those who welcome immigrants to their new chosen homelands. Peer through this window by reading the story of a young man who navigated from Ethiopia and Yemen to the US and Canada to establish his identity and purpose. The story shows how Adel Ben-Harhara succeeded after leaving behind everything he knew and attempted to embrace an unknown way of life on a new continent.

As the leader of the National Resistance Front, Ahmad Massoud articulates a vision for a liberated Afghanistan, free from the grasp of the Taliban and other terrorist groups. It's no coincidence that his father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was a military commander who led the resistance against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and later against the Taliban regime until his assassination on September 9, 2011.

In this remarkable memoir, Massoud describes the influence his father has had on him as the current leader of the resistance. His efforts, like those of his father, have always been about restoring peace--a peace that offers freedom, justice, and democracy to all citizens of Afghanistan. Massoud also explores Afghanistan's history, explaining how it has become so broken, and outlines his ideas for reforming the current political system and restoring stability.

Massoud delves into the principles of democracy, decentralization, and pluralism, emphasizing the importance of equality for all citizens, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religious beliefs. He also emphasizes the promotion of a rational and moderate interpretation of Islam in the Muslim world, advocating for a religious framework that supports rationalism, peace, tolerance, and coexistence. This aspect of his work underlines the importance of harmonizing religious beliefs with the principles of modern democracy and human rights.

This book is not just a political manifesto, but also a personal narrative that intertwines Massoud's experiences and aspirations for his nation's future, portraying a deep commitment to the values of liberty, justice, and human rights.

Even if our paths were different, he writes, the message that my father left for me is to never give up. I won't run away from the mission that awaits me.

A subtle psychological portrait of the author's relationship with his father during the twentieth-century battle for Palestinian human rights.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father's courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja's own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

By planes, trains, and automobiles, journalist Lou Salome has hitched his way through some of the most interesting - and volatile - places on Earth.

In September 1958, Lou Salome hurried past Barney McNeil's blacksmith shop to the town's blinking traffic light and began hitchhiking to college.

He was seventeen. Decades later his hitching experience led Salome through deserts and hostile zones in Asia, Europe and Africa. At the end of his internationalist life, he thumbed in the New Hampshire woods to gauge how times had changed. This is his story of the adventures, risks and the fun he embraced while engaging in a lost art.

sorrowful, tender...beautiful. - The New York Times Book Review

...arresting and memorable....Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience. - Financial Times

Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life. - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey

A surprising and lyrical journey--part memoir, part nature book--meditating on the meaning of flatness and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature's most undervalued wonders.

For readers of Dr. Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal, Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure

Does the concept of flat have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries' worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention.

Noreen Masud suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.

Masud's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.

Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place -- bodily and psychologically -- and the healing properties of literature and landscape.

Publishers Weekly Bestseller

Publisher Marketplace Bestseller

At the age of 16, he escaped persecution and made his way to America as a refugee. At 28, he secured a billion-dollar IPO. Today, he's redefining what it means to be an entrepreneur by building a new model of capitalism.

In the summer of 1987, Payam Zamani fled Iran. As a member of the Baha'i Faith, he had already survived years of religious persecution at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. Taking the only path available to him, he escaped to Pakistan through the Emptiness Desert: a harrowing five-day trek through one of the hottest, driest, and most hostile regions on the planet.

Twelve years later, he and his brother set records when the company they founded hit a $1.2 billion valuation on Wall Street. He was rich--on paper. But in the wake of yet another Wall Street meltdown, he learned the hard way that modern capitalism can be harmful to the human soul.

In 2015, Payam set the example he wanted to see by merging his business acumen with his spiritual beliefs and founding a new company--One Planet Group--this time without letting Wall Street or the venture capital world dictate the terms. Today, One Planet Group is proving that it's not only possible but necessary to build strong businesses while taking care of our employees, customers, communities, and the planet.

Crossing the Desert gives readers an intimate look at how the paths we choose, the values we embrace, and the systems we decide to participate in (or not) can make or break us, not only financially, but spiritually. Payam's story is a timely reminder that enduring and embracing life's most difficult journeys can lead us to a brighter future--not only for ourselves, but for the people around us, and even the world.

Pashtana's story highlights the resourcefulness and bravery of young women in Afghanistan. I hope readers will be inspired by her mission to give every girl the education she deserves and the opportunity to pursue her dreams.--Malala Yousafzai

Inspired by generations of her family's unwavering belief in the power of education, Pashtana Durrani recognized her calling early in life: to educate Afghanistan's girls and young women, raised in a society where learning is forbidden. In a country devastated by war and violence, where girls are often married off before reaching their teenage years and prohibited from leaving their homes, heeding that call seemed both impossible and dangerous.

Pashtana was raised in an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan where her father, a tribal leader, founded a community school for girls within their home. Fueled by his insistence that despite being a girl, she mattered and deserved an education, Pashtana was sixteen when, against impossible odds, she was granted a path out of the refugee camp: admittance to a preparatory program at Oxford. Unthinkably and to her parents' horror, she chose a different path. She chose Afghanistan.

Pashtana founded the nonprofit LEARN and developed a program for getting educational materials directly into the hands of girls in remote areas of the country, training teachers in digital literacy. Her commitment to education has made her a target of the Taliban. Still, she continues to fight for women's education and autonomy in Afghanistan and beyond.

Courageous and inspiring, Last to Eat, Last to Learn is the story of how just one person can transform a family, a tribe, a country. It reminds us of the emancipatory power of learning and the transformational potential that lies within each of us.

A portion of proceeds from Last to Eat, Last to Learn will be donated to LEARN (LearnAfghan.org), the NGO dedicated to providing quality education and healthcare to communities in conflict zones.

Water on Fire tells a story of immigration that starts in a Beirut devastated by the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90), continues with experiences of displacement in Europe and Africa, moves to northeastern American towns battered by lake-effect snow and economic woes, and ends in New York City on 9/11. A story of loss, but also of evolution, it models a kind of resilience inflected with humor, daring, and irreverence.

Alternating between his perspective as a child and as an adult, Tarek El-Ariss explores how we live with trauma, poignantly illustrating the profound impact of war on our perception of the world, our fears and longings. His memoir is at once historical and universal, intellectual and introspective, the outcome of a long and painful process of excavation that reveals internal turmoil and the predicament of conflict and separation. A contemporary interpretation of dreams dealing with monsters, invisible creatures, skin outbreaks, and the sea, it is a book about objects and elements, like water and fire, and about how encountering these elements triggers associations, connecting present and past, time and space.

This is the story of a young man's journey from Nazareth to Los Angeles, his struggles in a new country, and his passion for learning. It is also the story of growing up in a land that is rich in family but torn apart by the currents of history, and how that background ultimately shaped him to become a person dedicated to teaching and improving the lives of his students. It is at once an immigrant's story, a testament to the will of the Palestinian people, and an example of success that is achievable through hard work and education. This memoir is based on decades of personal journals in which the author recorded his daily activities, and it exists as both a family history and (he hopes) as an inspiration to current and future students to not give up on their dreams.

Ghassan S. Bisharat is a Palestinian American, a retired assistant professor of political science at Cal State Los Angeles, and a former high school social science teacher. Long retired, he and his wife now spend their days enjoying their three children and five wonderful grandchildren. He can also be found in his shed teaching his grandkids how to use tools and other equipment, in his home office studying current events, on cruise ships, or at a local casino trying his luck.

Saving Abigail is a true story about a little girl taken hostage by Hamas the morning of October 7, 2023, after thousands of terrorists breached Israel by land, sea, and air. That day, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 men, women, and children, and 246 innocent people were dragged across the border into Gaza against their will.

Among them was three-year-old Abigail Mor Edan, whose border community was ransacked by fighters going from house to house and killing, raping, and abducting civilians from their homes. Abigail's mother and father were murdered in front of their children, and Abigail-the youngest-was abducted.

With no prior experience or road map for how to save a hostage from captivity, Abigail's great aunt Liz Hirsh Naftali undertook an international effort to share her niece's face and story-with the US government, bipartisan congressional leaders, and world leaders-finding unlikely allies and supporters along the way. Though not a diplomat, politician, or military expert, Liz was determined to extricate this child from an ongoing geopolitical nightmare and free her from the Hamas terrorists who held her.

This is the story of a young man's journey from Nazareth to Los Angeles, his struggles in a new country, and his passion for learning. It is also the story of growing up in a land that is rich in family but torn apart by the currents of history, and how that background ultimately shaped him to become a person dedicated to teaching and improving the lives of his students. It is at once an immigrant's story, a testament to the will of the Palestinian people, and an example of success that is achievable through hard work and education. This memoir is based on decades of personal journals in which the author recorded his daily activities, and it exists as both a family history and (he hopes) as an inspiration to current and future students to not give up on their dreams.

Ghassan S. Bisharat is a Palestinian American, a retired assistant professor of political science at Cal State Los Angeles, and a former high school social science teacher. Long retired, he and his wife now spend their days enjoying their three children and five wonderful grandchildren. He can also be found in his shed teaching his grandkids how to use tools and other equipment, in his home office studying current events, on cruise ships, or at a local casino trying his luck.

Transform your life by challenging yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone.Embrace small changes that lead to big, meaningful transformations.Be inspired by Ramy's journey from unhealthy habits to a fulfilling, purpose-driven life.Overcome obstacles and live your best life ever.

Ramy walks you through the concepts of 'Let's Live', which focus on challenging yourself, finding answers to your questions, and living outside your comfort zone.

Through this eye-opening memoir, Ramy Naouss shows you how making small changes on a daily basis can lead to big, meaningful changes in your life.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to change your life for the better.