Gate of the Sun - Hardcover

Khoury, Elias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0976395029 ISBN 13: 9780976395027

Publisher: Archipelago Books, 2005

Synopsis

Gate of the Sun: Bab al-Shams is the first true magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. Through the passing of the beloved midwife and matriarch of the Shatila refugee camp outside Beirut, the reader enters a world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. A doctor tells a story to a man in a coma in an attempt to keep him alive. The patient, Yunes, is from Galilee, where he left Nahla, the love of his life. The novel unfolds at his bedside through Dr. Khalil’s intimate and haunting flights of memory.

Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian/Israeli -struggle for us, shedding light on the turbulent history with love and empathy. Khoury opens up a whole new territory, envisioning a place where confronting pain and humiliation might lead, if not to reconciliation, then at least to finding an element of the other in one’s self. “Us” and “Them” become inextricably entwined through this realigned 1001 Nights. Originally published in Beirut in 1998, the novel has been a sensation throughout the Arab world, in Israel, and throughout Europe.

About this title

About the Author:

Elias Khoury is the editor of the literary supplement of al-Nahar newspaper in Beirut. He has taught at the American University of Beirut, Columbia University, and NYU. Picador will bring out GATE of the SUN in paperback this spring and Little Mountain, Gates of the City, and The Journey of Little Ghandi. Davies' translations include Naguib Mahfouz's Thebes at War (American University in Cairo Press, 2003) and Alaa al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building (AUC Press, 2004). He has lived throughout North Africa and the Middle East and currently is based in Cairo.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Umm Hassan is dead. I saw everyone racing through the alleys of the camp and heard the sound of weeping. Everyone was spilling out of their houses, bent over to catch their tears, running. Nabilah, Mahmoud al-Qasemi’s wife, our mother, was dead. We called her mother because everyone born in the Shatila camp fell from their mother’s guts into her hands. I too had fallen into her hands, and I too ran the day she died.

About this edition

• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0976395029
• ISBN 13: 9780976395027
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 539