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Inside the Night: A Modern Arabic Novel
“I could not believe that human beings could forget so easily. . . .”
Love and life, sex and death, childhood and oppression are Inside the Night. Vivid moments of remembrance, disparate yet interconnected, come together to form the body― torn but not broken―of this novel. Beginning with a scene of departure, the two nameless narrators roam back and forth in time, veering from childhood mischief to a Palestinian refugee camp massacre; from ardent first love to necessary migration to an Arab oil country for employment; from spirited adolescent fantasies to the grim reality of life in an Arab country whose claims to progress are mounted on the bent backs of its people.
A forest of interwoven tales and strange destinies, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel carves the history of a people over half a century into fragments that are poetic, multi-sensory, and richly evocative. Inside the Night’s self-contained freedom is a refreshing development in the corpus of Palestinian, and human, literature.
Love and life, sex and death, childhood and oppression are Inside the Night. Vivid moments of remembrance, disparate yet interconnected, come together to form the body― torn but not broken―of this novel. Beginning with a scene of departure, the two nameless narrators roam back and forth in time, veering from childhood mischief to a Palestinian refugee camp massacre; from ardent first love to necessary migration to an Arab oil country for employment; from spirited adolescent fantasies to the grim reality of life in an Arab country whose claims to progress are mounted on the bent backs of its people.
A forest of interwoven tales and strange destinies, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel carves the history of a people over half a century into fragments that are poetic, multi-sensory, and richly evocative. Inside the Night’s self-contained freedom is a refreshing development in the corpus of Palestinian, and human, literature.
- GenresLiteratureContemporary
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
About the author
Ibrahim Nasrallah
74 books6,037 followersIbrahim Nasrallah (Arabic: إبراهيم نصرالله), the winner of the Arabic Booker Prize (2018), was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were forcibly displaced from their land in Al-Burayj, Palestine in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in a refugee camp in Jordan, and began his career as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked in the media and cultural sectors till 2006 when he dedicated his life to writing. To date, he has published 15 poetry collections, 22 novels, and several other books. In 1985, he started writing the Palestinian Comedy covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history in a series of novels in which each novel is an independent one; to date 13 novels have been published in the framework of this project. Five of his novels and a volume of poetry have been published in English, nine in Persian, four works in Italian, two in Spanish, and one novel in Danish and Turkish.
Nasrallah is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He won nine prizes, and his novel Prairies of Fever was chosen by the Guardian newspaper as one of the most important ten novels written by Arabs or non-Arabs about the Arab world. Three of his novels were listed on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for the years 2009, 2013, and 2014. In 2012 he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. His books are considered one of the most influential and best seller Arabic books, as new editions are released frequently and many young readers are attracted to his books.
In January 2014, he succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture that involved two Palestinian adolescents, a boy and a girl, who have lost their legs. The climb was in support to a nongovernmental organization dedicated to providing medical services to Palestinian and Arab children. Nasrallah wrote about this journey in a novel entitled The Spirits of Kilimanjaro (2015). In 2016, Nasrallah was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels for this work.
His novel The Second Dog War was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arabic Booker) for 2018. In 2020 he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the "Katara Prize" for Arabic Novels for the second time for his novel "A Tank Under the Christmas Tree".
Nasrallah is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He won nine prizes, and his novel Prairies of Fever was chosen by the Guardian newspaper as one of the most important ten novels written by Arabs or non-Arabs about the Arab world. Three of his novels were listed on the International Prize for Arabic Fiction for the years 2009, 2013, and 2014. In 2012 he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. His books are considered one of the most influential and best seller Arabic books, as new editions are released frequently and many young readers are attracted to his books.
In January 2014, he succeeded in summiting Mount Kilimanjaro in a venture that involved two Palestinian adolescents, a boy and a girl, who have lost their legs. The climb was in support to a nongovernmental organization dedicated to providing medical services to Palestinian and Arab children. Nasrallah wrote about this journey in a novel entitled The Spirits of Kilimanjaro (2015). In 2016, Nasrallah was awarded the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels for this work.
His novel The Second Dog War was awarded the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (Arabic Booker) for 2018. In 2020 he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the "Katara Prize" for Arabic Novels for the second time for his novel "A Tank Under the Christmas Tree".
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 27, 2015
I read this as part of the collection development project I've been working on at school: "Lost in Translation: Arabic into English." Surely, there was much that was lost on me in Nasrallah's book. I was unaware of the Tel al-Zattar massacre which seemed to be the most central and compelling plot of the novel. At least, that's the thin red line that kept me reading through the short 182 or so page novel. The rest was an interesting mish-mash of stream of consciousness-type rehashing of what I know to be the displaced Palestinian in the Levant and Gulf regions. There was a bit of being in Saudi in a seedy hotel, a bit of a man whose hand had been blown off, a bit of an illicit love affair, a bit of a refugee experience where black abaya-clad women and children were patiently pulling luggage. There was even a bit of suicide-bomber jihad. Things I can only relate to as "the other." I think that was okay for first reading, though, because what came through was a frustration, a small proportion of the frustration that the author has been though in his own experience and in his nation's experience. The futility of waiting. The futility of talking. The book challenged me to learn more. The end was definitely clincher. It funneled down like a tight poem. And, there were some pretty immortal lines, one of which will stay with me forever: "We deserve to see at least one miracle that isn't covered in blood." Think about that. Are there really any true miracles which haven't been covered in blood? That's one of the most ancient things I've ever seen in print. It took my breath away.
January 26, 2020
Nasrallah’s nameless narrator tells three interwoven, splintering, fragmented stories of loss, dispossession and alienation all sent against the nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes – but that is a distant although always present event. Although the timeframe is shifting and unclear, the narrative turns around the central figure’s trip abroad as a guest of a cultural festival, which quickly becomes obscured and obfuscated by the machinations of the host state and the sense of exile. Other, emerging, narratives turn on a brutal assault on a refugee camp (it seems either Sabra or Shatila, in Beirut, in 1982), and the narrators emerging erotic life – I’d hesitate to call is a sex life, it seems more ‘desire’ than ‘fulfilment’.
It is likely that all three story lines centre on the same person even though the narrative engages with life events that could be more ‘historical’ event (1982 War or 1st Intifada), the ‘exile’ ‘home’ to a seemingly unspecified Gulf state and the Palestinian-specific references held back until late in the story. Despite its fragmented character, Nasrallah manages his characters well – perhaps because none are named but known only in relation to the narrator: the ‘little neighbour’, the ‘woman in the lift’, the ‘other one’. This novel of relationships therefore flows better than a novel of named individuals, even if it risks reducing those characters, individuals all, to figures who exist only in relation to the one (narrator). At the same time, they become, paradoxically, generic everypersons hiding in shelters, managing their dispossession, dealing with their loss. With all of this, the fragmentation works well to create a richly rounded and cast narrating figure who may also be one of those everypersons.
Nasrallah has given a fabulous novel of dispossession, a tale of colonialism and exile, of shattered lives, shattered persons and shattered homes and of so many of the absurdities that flow from that. It is far from an easy read, the visceral accounts of the camp attacks, if nothing else, ensure that, but it is a rewarding read hovering on the brink of the surreal and magic realism with a solid underpinning of realism.
It is likely that all three story lines centre on the same person even though the narrative engages with life events that could be more ‘historical’ event (1982 War or 1st Intifada), the ‘exile’ ‘home’ to a seemingly unspecified Gulf state and the Palestinian-specific references held back until late in the story. Despite its fragmented character, Nasrallah manages his characters well – perhaps because none are named but known only in relation to the narrator: the ‘little neighbour’, the ‘woman in the lift’, the ‘other one’. This novel of relationships therefore flows better than a novel of named individuals, even if it risks reducing those characters, individuals all, to figures who exist only in relation to the one (narrator). At the same time, they become, paradoxically, generic everypersons hiding in shelters, managing their dispossession, dealing with their loss. With all of this, the fragmentation works well to create a richly rounded and cast narrating figure who may also be one of those everypersons.
Nasrallah has given a fabulous novel of dispossession, a tale of colonialism and exile, of shattered lives, shattered persons and shattered homes and of so many of the absurdities that flow from that. It is far from an easy read, the visceral accounts of the camp attacks, if nothing else, ensure that, but it is a rewarding read hovering on the brink of the surreal and magic realism with a solid underpinning of realism.
September 13, 2026
My last novel for the present by this year’s Neustadt Award winner, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Inside the Night is a very modernist novel about the Palestinians in the contemporary Middle East. I would say it is not about the Palestinians versus the Israelis, but about the treatment of the Palestinian refugees in the Arab countries.
It opens with two men, “I” and “the other one” having just arrived at an airport. They have been invited to a Festival and are surprised that no one is waiting for them in the airport lounge. No one seems to have heard about the Festival, and when they try to telephone someone about it, the telephones don’t have any dial tones, although they seem to work for everyone else. This Kafkaesque thread persists throughout the book, with strange hotels and characters who seem to mysteriously show up and disappear. The airport is also filled with women and children escaping from a massacre somewhere. We aren’t told where the airport is, although later there are hints that it may be Beirut; we also learn later on that the date they arrived is September 16, 1991. This may be significant, in that while I could not find any references to a massacre on that date in 1991 (although Palestinian refugees were being expelled from some Arab countries around that time) it would be the ninth anniversary of the massacres at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps between September 16 and 18, 1982.
After a few pages, we find ourselves in a shelter in a refugee camp, which is being bombarded, apparently by two separate forces. The narrator is a young boy who is living with his parents and a small sister. We aren’t sure whether this is contemporary with the first story (with a different narrator) or a flashback to the same narrator’s childhood, in which case it might refer to Shatila or Sabra, although probably we are not intended to identify it too specifically in any case. It is the common experience of the Palestinians in exile. This thread also keeps reappearing, sometimes in the shelter and sometimes in a basement nearby, and clearly not in chronological order. Naturally, it is full of horrors with children being blown up and people starving a few blocks from food supplies.
We then find ourselves in a nightmare, where the narrator is being eaten by members of his family. Again, we don’t know for sure if it is the same “I” as in the other threads. There is also an episode with the narrator and a woman who are arguing about a demonstration; again, the same narrator at a different time or a different one? The phone rings, but they don’t answer it; it may be a call from the first narrator (which in the strange time of this book doesn’t necessarily mean they are not the same person at different times.) From time to time the “I” and “the other one” have various erotic adventures with various women, or recount them to each other, some of which may be real, while others seem to be dream sequences.
I have separated different “threads”, but in the actual novel they are simply juxtaposed as if they form one continuous narrative, often in surrealist fashion jumping from one to another based on a repeated phrase or word. At the end, they all form one surrealist narrative block, and the book ends with “the other one” telling the “I” that he should write a novel about their “experience”.
For me, this didn’t entirely work, but that may be less a criticism of Nasrallah’s book than due to the fact that I have read so many novels of this type that neither the horrors nor the style are as novel or as shocking as they are meant to be (and may have been for Arab readers thirty-five years ago).
It opens with two men, “I” and “the other one” having just arrived at an airport. They have been invited to a Festival and are surprised that no one is waiting for them in the airport lounge. No one seems to have heard about the Festival, and when they try to telephone someone about it, the telephones don’t have any dial tones, although they seem to work for everyone else. This Kafkaesque thread persists throughout the book, with strange hotels and characters who seem to mysteriously show up and disappear. The airport is also filled with women and children escaping from a massacre somewhere. We aren’t told where the airport is, although later there are hints that it may be Beirut; we also learn later on that the date they arrived is September 16, 1991. This may be significant, in that while I could not find any references to a massacre on that date in 1991 (although Palestinian refugees were being expelled from some Arab countries around that time) it would be the ninth anniversary of the massacres at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps between September 16 and 18, 1982.
After a few pages, we find ourselves in a shelter in a refugee camp, which is being bombarded, apparently by two separate forces. The narrator is a young boy who is living with his parents and a small sister. We aren’t sure whether this is contemporary with the first story (with a different narrator) or a flashback to the same narrator’s childhood, in which case it might refer to Shatila or Sabra, although probably we are not intended to identify it too specifically in any case. It is the common experience of the Palestinians in exile. This thread also keeps reappearing, sometimes in the shelter and sometimes in a basement nearby, and clearly not in chronological order. Naturally, it is full of horrors with children being blown up and people starving a few blocks from food supplies.
We then find ourselves in a nightmare, where the narrator is being eaten by members of his family. Again, we don’t know for sure if it is the same “I” as in the other threads. There is also an episode with the narrator and a woman who are arguing about a demonstration; again, the same narrator at a different time or a different one? The phone rings, but they don’t answer it; it may be a call from the first narrator (which in the strange time of this book doesn’t necessarily mean they are not the same person at different times.) From time to time the “I” and “the other one” have various erotic adventures with various women, or recount them to each other, some of which may be real, while others seem to be dream sequences.
I have separated different “threads”, but in the actual novel they are simply juxtaposed as if they form one continuous narrative, often in surrealist fashion jumping from one to another based on a repeated phrase or word. At the end, they all form one surrealist narrative block, and the book ends with “the other one” telling the “I” that he should write a novel about their “experience”.
For me, this didn’t entirely work, but that may be less a criticism of Nasrallah’s book than due to the fact that I have read so many novels of this type that neither the horrors nor the style are as novel or as shocking as they are meant to be (and may have been for Arab readers thirty-five years ago).
April 27, 2026
"Non ci si invita a casa propria".
La narrazione segue uno schema non convenzionale che personalmente non ho amato. Sono riuscita ad apprezzare il libro solo dopo aver letto la postfazione dove sono chiarite alcune immagini che non ero riuscita a cogliere durante la lettura.
La narrazione segue uno schema non convenzionale che personalmente non ho amato. Sono riuscita ad apprezzare il libro solo dopo aver letto la postfazione dove sono chiarite alcune immagini che non ero riuscita a cogliere durante la lettura.
July 5, 2021
Perhaps there is no coherent way to describe this book except to say that this is what it feels like to be inside a hallucination. A hallucination in the form of a refugee’s segmented memories.
The book is heavily symbolic. The main plot revolves around the events of a massacre happening in a Palestinian refugee camp. The rest is a mash-up of a variety of scenes with nameless characters, nameless fighters, nameless murderers, a nameless refugee camp, a nameless massacre, a flight to a nameless gulf country. The significance of the book's opening page (slide 2) won’t make sense until you read the book and understand the power of names. A lot of what is mentioned comes straight out of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s own experiences, including the massacre and the traveling to a gulf country part.
Readers later assumed this nameless massacre refers to the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, although no specifics are mentioned in the book. Tel al-Zaatar massacre took place during the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. Tel al-Zaatar (literal translation: The Hill of Thyme) was an UNRWA administered Palestinian Refugee camp housing approximately 50,000-60,000 refugees in northeast Beirut.
Original title in Arabic:
مجرد اثنان فقط- إبراهيم نصرالله
The book is heavily symbolic. The main plot revolves around the events of a massacre happening in a Palestinian refugee camp. The rest is a mash-up of a variety of scenes with nameless characters, nameless fighters, nameless murderers, a nameless refugee camp, a nameless massacre, a flight to a nameless gulf country. The significance of the book's opening page (slide 2) won’t make sense until you read the book and understand the power of names. A lot of what is mentioned comes straight out of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s own experiences, including the massacre and the traveling to a gulf country part.
Readers later assumed this nameless massacre refers to the Tel al-Zaatar massacre, although no specifics are mentioned in the book. Tel al-Zaatar massacre took place during the Lebanese Civil War in 1976. Tel al-Zaatar (literal translation: The Hill of Thyme) was an UNRWA administered Palestinian Refugee camp housing approximately 50,000-60,000 refugees in northeast Beirut.
Original title in Arabic:
مجرد اثنان فقط- إبراهيم نصرالله
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