The Lord

by Soraya Antonius

During the 1936 Arab Revolt in Mandatory Palestine, a young man gains renown as a magician of a revolutionary sort, traveling across the country and seemingly performing Christ-like miracles—meanwhile evading the British colonialist forces who seek to destroy him and the resistance he represents.

Set in Mandatory Palestine during the 1936 Arab Revolt against the British colonial authorities, The Lord is the story of Tareq, a young man from Jaffa who is capable, or so it seems, of performing Christ-like miracles. It is also the story of Miss Alice Rhodes, an English missionary who teaches Tareq as a boy, and who recounts Tareq's life to a journalist in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Considered an unremarkable student by his teachers, Tareq is nevertheless something of a magician. After leaving school, he travels and performs across the country, and soon rumors fly of his incredible feats, from walking through walls to averting storms of locusts to curing olives trees barren of fruit.

Tareq’s performances become increasingly defiant of the British administration as he urges his fellow Palestinians to rise up against their oppressors. This draws the attention of the British chief of intelligence, Challis, who will stop at nothing to crush Tareq and the resistance he stands for. 

With The Lord, Soraya Antonius recreates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, painting a portrait of Palestinian society at once panoramic and intimate. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for the conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and poignant now as ever.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Classics, Historical, Literary Fiction, 20th Century, Middle East

248 pages, Paperback

Published December 2, 2025

Reviews

[Ashraf Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

رواية عن فترة الانتداب البريطاني على
فلسطين هذه الفترة التي مهد فيها الاحتلال
لسيطرة اليهود عليها.. الرواية لا تحوي أحداث
تاريخية لكنها تحكي قصة مقاوم عادي جدا
من الشعب كل ما هنالك انه ساحر يؤدي بعض
الحيل السحرية التافهة ويتعامل مع الإنجليز
هل هو ساحر حقا؟ هناك ترميز في الرواية
يجعلك تطرح العديد من الأسئلة.

[Katherine Cherington · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book some beautiful parts, some amazingly witty/ironic parts, some parts of just good storytelling. The writing was skilled but not exactly my thing. It felt a bit purposefully choppy and confusing, which I didn’t love. But I think that was more of a personal preference.

3.5/5

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5/5

A month or so earlier, the British had passed an emergency decree banning the wearing of the keffiya and ordering the arrest for questioning of anyone seen wearing it. until then it had been worn mainly by peasants, but on the morning following the decree the city of Palestinians appeared in the streets of Jerusalem and other main towns defiantly wearing the headdress that hitherto they had looked down upon as a sign of poverty and backwardness.

Talk of free speech and the iniquity of secret police is a fairly recent phenomenon in the West; generally it follows by a few years the end of their last dominions or other "possessions" and the consequent uselessness to them of such methods.

Every so often, I receive praise for being "strong' or "brave" or even "noble" for one thing or another. What it is in truth is drastically reined in caustic bitterness, wherein I channel my instinctive tendency towards self-righteous vitriol by filtering it through dense weaves of dialectical awareness, airtight rhetoric, and as subversive a compassionate take on contemporary pedagogy as can be afforded under settler state neoliberalism. Finding kindred spirits IRL only works as well as both parties can keep tight control over their respective tempers, but if the fellow soul is safely dead, I'm not above reflecting and refracting as is necessary to fight like hell for the living. Soraya Antonius is one such entrenched intellectual, and her story is Orientalism spat back in the face of many a well-purported master, even at times taking on Said when it comes to the Oriental woman. It makes for the sort of the work that those best educated enough to understand it are also the ones most prepared to disdain it as "woke hysteria," while those with the best intentions will likely not have the tools for parsing Antonius' multi-tiered satire, where characters are bylines for countries and the reader must be told and told and told again so that successive generations of writers are afforded in this beleaguered wasteland of "Western literature" to be able to show. I myself am no properly trained academic in the ways of this writing on Palestine, but permit me some attempt to serve as a bridge nonetheless.

In the Arab world the words "my teacher" carry connotations undreamt of in countries where teachers are only another branch of the civil service, ill-paid and despised. The words imply a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid, a debt that only death discharges. Even "my mother" or "my father" are not so heavily loaded, since in those cases one can repay by caring for aged and helpless parents, who indeed generated one for this specific purpose, while one can never teach one's teacher, who laid the foundations of all subsequently acquired knowledge, wealth, success.

The horror of Sindbad's tale is that the woman never turns up and he has to do the work himself, that's what has made him a legend.

One of the many powers of the status quo is the ability to reset the clock/wipe clean the slate of context/first aggressor/original sin whenever convenient. And so we have Oct 7 when we should be talking 1948, or 1920, or at least 1917. Of course, this gives certain folks the excuse to play myopic true Scotsman with the word 'indigenous,' but if those folks really cared, they'd be arguing for giving every displaced people's a GDP in aid, especially in relation to certain 'first world' settler states. In any case, here, Antonius tells the tale of a Jesus figure in the time of Mandatory Palestine and reckons with him under the exigencies of imperial panopticon and colonial pedagogy, where power weds disgust to wealth and breeds emotional truths for the highest bidder. The Balfour Declaration comes on with Haussmann intent, and suddenly houses must make way for sanitization and the people must make way for Orde Wingate. It's a tale within a tale within a tale of settler bombs and high commissioners with no clothes, but unlike the morality plays commonly peddled today as political thrillers and influencer thinkpieces, this one will gladly juxtapose the true origins of the dividing and the conquering. Antonius could have certainly fleshed out more and spread some of the narrative over a more forgiving length, but having gone through the effort of backtracking a page or more to parse the super-subtle turning point on several occasions, I'm loathe to give up the resulting hair-trigger instinct that made the last third of the book nothing short of phenomenal in narrative elucidation and brutal wit.

It was a variety of ambition that neither his wife nor Miss Alice would have questioned at the time, but which today makes me, and thousands like me, scratch their sluggish minds in vain to understand, whether in Latin America or in Asia, some special category exists which, at the age when most children dream of becoming TIR drivers, or space astronauts, or computer programmers, dreams only the black room, and flesh that can be altered.

He said the name of our villages would be wiped out of memory and that even the cemeteries would vanish. He is quite mad. People can't play with the forces of the jinn and not be affected.

It's just as well this book is so short, intro and glossary and all. Any work by a woman of color that makes its way into the rarefied company of NYRB Classics and its ilk must often cut itself down to size, and I have my doubts whether it would have ever made it out of the thickets of translation if Antonius did not have her unscrupulous grasp on English. Give and take, give and take, but in the end, this fiction takes its place alongside Hamas Contained and Gate of the Sun: unsentimental, unforgiving, wrapped in the coldest logic to ever be obdurately devoted to the abject of one's immediate habitus that I've witnessed in a long time. If more folks like this weren't so easily scared/paid off, the world would be a better place. But that would be too easy, wouldn't it.

"Oh come on, Challis, we can't hang someone on Good Friday. You know that."
"It's not Good Friday."
"We wouldn't do it on Yom Kippur either," said Kit angrily. "And as you know, we are mandated to treat all religions equally. No one is ever hanged during Ramadan and it will upset people quite unnecessarily."
"Are you certain? The man committed blasphemy. He's claimed something that no good Moslem can possibly accept. It might make a point to finish with him at a time when believers are exempt."

In the space of the week that I finished this, we lost Dolly Parton and then Tim Curry. While I certainly took advantage of more conventional avenues of mourning, working over this piece has proved a singularly appropriate conduit for my paradigm of channeled fury. Antonius puts the fear in the heart of any paternalistic op-ed or equivocating populist, and her portrait of Palestine forces you to look the facts straight in the face, if you can only bear it. So, kudos to NYRB Classics for pulling through long after I had assumed their publishing courage had flown the coop. Their reward is my sourcing a copy for my workplace.

Olive tree, deeper rooted, more fruitful and enduring than the fragile cedar whose own sons eradicated it from the fate of the earth, selling it to the Israelites as timber before they chopped it down for souvenirs, than the palm of the oasis or the death tree of the Latins.

By then the papers had found other subjects, Palestine not enjoying the capacity to increase sales, and things went on as before, except in the destroyed homes.

[Robin J · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Lord by Soraya Antonius is a sharp, smart, bitterly funny, and, at times, brutal anti-colonial novel. I have never read anything like this, and it has leapt to the top of my best books list.

A reporter comes to Lebanon in the 1980s hoping to find information about a Palestinian magician, Tareq, from the 1930s, whose performances became increasingly subversive. Antonius's narrative shifts back in time and we hear from a variety of characters involved in Tareq's fate: an English teacher who taught young Tareq, a journalist who sees his early performances, a British security chief who pegs Tareq as dangerous to the British empire as well as Tareq's mother, a young married Arab woman Tareq helped, and other British authorities.

Each section starts abruptly without much context, making the reading a bit slow going until I got used to her style. Yet I love what she writes-- I spent a lot of time rereading her sentences to enjoy their artistry.

Antonius tells a relatively simple story that is complicated by a variety of characters and themes: the arrogance of the British, the inhumanity of the colonial project, and the harsh life of Palestinian women. Then there is Tareq himself - who is he really? The dry wells that suddenly produce water, the reporter's broken ribs that turn out to be only bruised, the "emperor has no clothes" moment at the British holiday party, is it all actual magic or simply coincidence and a need to explain the unexpected?

Antonius doesn't offer answers, but her observations of the British colonial system are furious and funny in a bleak, bitter way. Reading this felt like watching a performer navigate a high wire; I held my breath at times, wondering if she could pull it off. The end, in particular, could have gone so wrong, but honestly, it is absolutely perfect for the story she tells.

This is my favorite fiction book of the year.

[Bill Silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is simultaneously a rich, powerful, and often beautiful (even when it is terrible things being described) depiction of life in Palestine before the Nakba, as well as a devastating indictment of colonial rule and oppression during the years of the British Mandate. The writing style (ultimately so impressive) and structure of the novel take some getting used to…but it’s worth the struggle to get into the story (stories) and to piece together the overarching narrative here—which is in the end heartbreaking for just about everyone (there’s only one irredeemable villain here, just magnificently rendered in all his banal evilness). There’s also wry humor, clever irony and biting satire, and even some unconsummated romance(s)…in addition to a gloves-off history lesson about this time period and set of events. Having some background knowledge is helpful…there’s a good introduction to the novel in the reprint edition I read that discusses both the novel and its author. That the novel is still timely is obvious…the roots of present-day horrors are in this tragic past.

[Tommy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found it pretty hard to read. Moves incredibly fast, jumps back and forth through time at unexpected moments, and has no real chapter breaks.

[rachy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading ‘The Lord’ feels like walking in on someone telling a story that’s half way through. You kind of understand on the surface what’s going on, maybe you can glean a little extra from the context, but for the most part you don’t really know who or what the speaker is really talking about. I began to feel this way by about 10 pages in, and barring brief periods of lucidity, it never really went away. It’s a shame, because this was otherwise so beautifully written, but its refusal to give enough clarity began to feel genuinely disrespectful to my time as a reader. It’s worse too because it feels like with just a little more of an eye to this, ‘The Lord’ could have been a really wonderful book. As it is, the narrative is too disjointed and unnecessarily over complicated to match the high quality of the prose, and so it felt impossible to connect with and invest in the story, no matter how hard I tried.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

“It brought no luck to Palestine to have two such wildly contrasting symbols of its nature, the austere mythical gnarled reminder of time lasting, eternity, and the luxuriant green and juice gold blowsy abundance of fruit and flower, simultaneity.”

Paints a vivid picture of life in Palestine before the Nakba and thoroughly reminds one of the callous evil of the British mandate. Never forget that the British are and always were contemptible imperial freaks! Hard to follow at times with some very abrupt time jumps and a framing device that also played with time. Full of evocative and powerful passages however.

[Julian Worker · Rating 3 out of 5]

The narrator of this book is an unnamed journalist in The Lebanon of the early 1980s.

She is covering present events but takes an interest in the past. She is particularly interested in a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British League of Nations' mandate and who played a significant role in the 1936 - 1939 Palestinian uprising against colonialism.

The journalist's curiosity leads her to Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq's teacher in a mission school. According to Miss Alice, Tareq was an undistinguished student but did have uncanny powers / magical powers that Miss Alice couldn't explain.

How Tareq puts these powers to use in the novel's story.

[Henry Barrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the most beautiful prose I’ve read in a while. It’s easy to get lost in one of Soraya Antonius’ fast-moving descriptions of a busy fair or marketplace and have to double back and find your way through. On the very next page, though, she’ll linger over an image of cruelty or heartbreak, forcing you to pause with her.

“The Lord” layers a 1980s storyline over one set in the 1930s, and parallels are frequently drawn to show the way that, for the poor, rural women of Palestine, very little changed in those 50 years. Reading this in the 2020s, as the rapes, murder, starvation, and humiliation continue, was a depressing experience to say the least.

[Griffin Mendel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Safely the most alive and rich conjuring of The Holy Land I've come across, the not so distant past is brilliantly resurrected alongside Jerusalem, Jaffa, the sprawling Palestinian countryside and the numerous groups living within it. The narrative is a bit fractured through a journalists time jumping perspective but a bit of attentiveness makes it rather easy to understand where in time you are. Maybe the most impressive aspect of Antonius' writing is how often her characters are so fully realized with often just a sentence or two of characterization. There is a funereal aspect to reading this novel in 2026 as all developments since it's publication leave it largely as a reminder that things were always going to get much, much worse.

[Cory · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was very invested in the plot at first, but as it went on, it felt like there was no real flow, and every new development just fell flat.

[Evan Bertschy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful portrait of Mandatory Palestine and all the forces at play however, for me its characters were spread too thin and lacked enough depth. A true historical set piece though with some very sweet moments.

[Akash]

Really compelling anticolonial novel with an immersive view of Palestinian life during British occupation. I could do without the ‘story within a story’ aspect of the novel since I don’t think it added much. Final scene was very striking, though.

[ñick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rough but extremely vivid rendering of Palestinian life under the British Mandate; very much worth reading alongside some of her sociological writing.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taking place during the years leading up to the Nakba while Palestine was under British control, The Lord depicts daily Palestinian life as it becomes increasingly intolerable for the Palestinians as Jewish settler forces—in conjunction with the British military—arrest, torture, and kill Palestinian civilians and destroy or steal their homes and property. At the heart of the story are Miss Alice, the daughter of a British Christian missionary, who teaches at an English-language school, and one of her former students Tareq. The British bring with them their class snobbery and anti-Semitism, an anti-Semitism that in no way benefits Muslims, who are seen as even more appalling. As with Leon Uris’s hideous novel Exodus, Muslims are variously described by the British characters as stupid, smelly, sneaky, lazy, and unprincipled. The British sense of the Muslim Palestinian’s inherent inferiority means that, in the instance of Tareq that guides the novel’s path, when Tareq scores perfectly on an exam that will allow him a pathway to better remunerated work within the civil service, Miss Alice assumes—without evidence—that he must have cheated.

Tareq is kicked out of school, his certificate denied, forcing him to find a different way to realize his dreams and financially support his mother. He takes up magic, performing rudimentary tricks for audiences in villages throughout Palestine. Being a roaming magician allows Tarque the closest he can come to seeing the world, by slowly expanding the geographical range of the village he visits.

Miss Alice isn’t sure whether she should feel guilty for the fate she has imposed upon Tareq, an unease increased whenever she sees him around town, his disappointment in her never shown. In fact, he remains amiable in her presence, wishes her well, and converses with her when he can—a residue of hopefulness on his part that a word from her could change his status.

While Tareq roams from village to village, anti-Jewish settlers mount increasingly frequent attacks against the British and Jews. A member of the British forces assumes that no one can innocently roam from town to town, that Tareq must be a scout for terrorist forces, and so a correspondence between the attacks and Tareq’s magic acts are assumed to be coordinated.

There must be an entire subgenre of fiction devoted to well-meaning Europeans arriving in countries with cultures unfamiliar to them, which they have no intentions of understanding but, instead, intent to impose what is in the best interests of a benighted people. We know already that, for such people, an industrious young man trying to support his mother, who also shows kindness to his neighbors, well such a man is only asking for trouble.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Purely as a book and exercise in storytelling, I thought this wasn't remarkable, but the content and provenance are. Antonius was a writer, journalist, and activist who mostly lived and studied in Egypt, Lebanon, and England, but who was born and raised into a well-to-do Palestinian Arab family in Jerusalem -- her father is George Antonius, who wrote a book in the '30s considered to be foundational for Arab nationalism. Soraya Antonius herself wrote The Lord as a refugee of sorts during the Lebanese Civil War.

This book is by design disjointed, and it admittedly feels like it -- Selma Sabbagh mentions a quote in the introduction where Antonius is remarking on how "frequently confusing, impenetrable" many of the stories she heard and recorded from Palestinian women in refugee camps were. This book was intended to possess a similar quality -- I found it a little jarring and often hard to get into, but knowing that it was deliberate makes me want to give it more grace.

The Lord is told by an unnamed female journalist in the 1980s who's principally interviewing an English woman, Miss Alice Rhodes, who taught Palestinian children at her father's missionary school since she was a young woman. The journalist is particularly concerned with her relationship with a boy named Tareq, a former pupil of Miss Rhodes' who came to be known as an itinerant magician of sorts -- at least that's how the British administration mostly sees him, whereas many peasants remember him as a miracle worker.

Tareq is surveilled throughout the novel by a man named Challis, the head of the mandate's military intelligence wing. He too scoffs at and waves off Tareq's supposed abilities, but finds him impertinent -- which, for so unscrupulous and vindictive a man, is all it takes to eventually lead him to pin whatever charges he can on Tareq, bogus or otherwise.

There are a number of characters who appear and dip out and reappear -- they're sometimes relevant to Tareq, but at other times are meant to just portray British Mandate Palestine from different strata. There are 3 major British characters other than Challis -- Alice, a journalist named Egerton, and a bright, ambitious adjutant to the High Commissioner named Farren who had a brief tryst with Alice. All three are portrayed sympathetically, though by no means guiltlessly -- Alice unwittingly but carelessly implicates Tareq, Egerton is more or less unwilling to risk his career to write the truly scathing pieces he knows he should, and Farren is no monster but is all the same a dutiful colonialist.

The Palestinian characters are treated likewise -- Um Tareq, Tareq's mother, is almost as callous and vindictive as Challis, selling and informing on her neighbors and son as an agent for the British and by extension the Zionists. Buthaina is a 'young woman' -- a girl, really -- married off to an old man as a second wife who Tareq begins to fall for after he helps her with her infertility problems. Like Alice, their relationship incidentally helps the British intelligence to nail Tareq -- and in the process her home is destroyed 'by mistake' by Challis' men.

And finally Tareq -- handsome and charismatic but generally not exceptionally remarkable in any other sense than the powers he ostensibly possesses/invokes. Not even particularly brave: Tareq is increasingly 'radicalized' (i.e., given no other choice) throughout as he witnesses and experiences the injustices firsthand across Palestine, but he still never commits anything more heinous than acknowledging publicly what all can see -- which is plenty enough for Challis to ultimately have him hanged in the final pages.

Though I don't think the narrative is particularly exceptional or expertly told, the setting and feeling of a place out of time is the real highlight. Antonius paints a Palestine, a Jaffa in particular, that's long gone in much of anything but the collective memory of a people, though the fate of those people is increasingly becoming much the same as the land they occupied -- heinously and meticulously liquidated and built over in broad daylight.

A book that's seemingly condemned to be eternally relevant -- the form is a little rough at times, but worth reading as a testimonial and expression.

[Marie-Elise Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Lord by Soraya Antonius is both a historical novel and an impressionistic meditation on life in Palestine during the final years of the British Mandate. The book unfolds slowly, asking for patience, and rewarding it. At its best, it offers a richly textured portrait of the Levant when it was unmistakably multi-cultural, multi-religious, and multi-ethnic—a world of layered identities and uneasy coexistence.
Antonius’s prose is dense, descriptive, and often luminous. Some sentences demand to be read two or three times, so evocative are they of a distant time and place. The writing lingers over landscape, gesture, and memory, creating an atmosphere that feels both intimate and universal. The beauty of the land and its people is unmistakable, but so are the conflicts that continue unresolved to this day.
Beneath its historical setting, the novel resonates sharply with the present. Many of the tensions and questions it explores feel not only familiar, but in some cases even more fraught today. The result is a contemplative, beautifully written novel that bridges past and present with quiet insistence.

[Lila · Rating 3 out of 5]

The good things about this historical novel is that it focuses on British colonialism during the British mandate in Palestine, showing the roots of what led to the rebellion of 1936, and our current events. Antonius evokes in rich detail traditional Palestinian life. A helpful glossary of terms is included.

However, while about three-fourths of the novel shows great potential, suggestive of E. M. Forster's novels set in India, with conflicting cultural understandings, this badly needs a good editor. The journalist characters tend to blend into one another. The policeman, Challis, is unbelievable; his motives are not clear. He becomes a pursuing demon suggestive of Javert from Les Miserables.

If the Christ-like character of Tareq was allowed to remain mysterious with various conflicting accounts, this would have been a good novel, albeit a bit Victorian in plot, but, alas, the ending, in an attempt to tie into current events, gets bogged down in multiple confusing symbols that muddy the plot. The hawk is particularly unnecessary, as is much of the ending.

[Kyle Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Here hindsight must break in again: what never occurred to him was a fact that every child learns today: the system is only as good as the questions you ask of it."

While Soraya Antonius paints a beautiful portrait of pre-Nakba Palestinian life, the scattered and digressional nature of the narrative didn't work for me. Great sections and strong writing, but more often than not I found myself at a bit of a distance from a work I would otherwise love. When the author takes a step back from the story in order to provide a treatise on religion or politics, its hard to deny its brilliance. I am intrigued enough to look into getting Where The Jinn Consult which is, as far as I can tell, the only other publication buy Antonius. Good book, wish I had connected a bit more to it, though.

"Whatever is used at the time is the worst weapon imaginable and frightens people out of their wits. It doesn't make them happier to be told that their children, if they survive to have any, will face something unimaginably nastier."

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author uses a lot of complicated point-of-view devices in this novel set between the 1930s and '80s. Perhaps these shifting perspectives echo the numerous ethnic groups mentioned (here and in the books of the Bible) and the varying accounts belonging to each of the great religions rooted in the Holy Land. The first-person "I" is a touch disappointing, but somehow it works from a feminist perspective.

This is a good addition to an "Israel/Palestine" bookshelf. I personally was leery of reading this after living through the period from 10/7/23 to US Election Day. But for people inclined to look at root problems, British colonialism, here examined in the interwar period, does not come off well.

Antonius throws in offhand nuggets to keep the gray areas strong: Armenians, wishing to keep a low profile during the Ottoman years. A Black slave, kept by an Arab family during the British mandate.

The writing can be both lovely and brutal.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

oddly difficult and has a problem of focalization (weird, weird details), in my opinion, but it's hard not to feel when moving through its descriptive passage that tareq's miracle of clarity is materializing on the page, where something otherwise obfuscated suddenly becomes illuminated to all time: "if you live among olive trees you discover that the trivial blossom does have a scent of its own, dry and powdery and curiously negative, almost an anti-scent that hovers behind the mind, cancelling stronger flowers, as its puny bitter fruit overpowers richer tastes." the conclusion with tareq's mother is a true gut punch. one of my favorite parts came early with miss alice's description of colonial agriculture: the british removing from the land the stones that acted as diurnal reserves of moisture ... i also found the glossary somewhat strange in this novel. i could follow a lot of the arabic terms just fine, and it was the british order of society that actually puzzled me

[Isabel · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars

The Lord has genuinely beautiful writing and while historical fiction I did enjoy reading about Palestinian life, the good and the bad. While short though, I found the structure of this to be a bit tough to get through. Stories and characters weave between each other often and the narrator, a journalist interviewing a teacher about her experiences fifty years in the past, often would jump in with a comment which pulled me from the story. Characters sometimes were vaguely referred to and I had a hard time identifying who was speaking about what and to whom. When I did understand however, I enjoyed the narrative and greatly descriptive writing.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written book that I found quite difficult to read. Palestine in the 1930's as British policy is changing, more Jews are settling in the territory, unrest is increasing. In the 1950's teacher is being interviewed about those times of unrest (when she was a young teacher) and particularly about a student of hers who became a magician and sowed political unrest - which wasn't hard to do! While often quite lyrical the story moves through different time periods, new characters enter the scene, disappear or not. I'm glad I stuck with it because it takes place in an important time and place about which I know little.

[Paris · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this book but am ultimately glad that I read it. The story itself was interesting but there was something about the writing style that I didn't vibe with. It's told in a very fragmented and disjointed manner which was I think intentional but it made the overall reading experience more difficult. It very much felt like a story pieced together by second and third hand accounts. Temporally, this book was very interesting because Tareq's story takes place pre-Nakba in the 1930s in Mandatory Palestine but it is narrated from/written in the 80s around the First Intifada and I was reading in the wake of October 7, 2023--three very fraught periods in Palestinian history will all too many similarities despite taking place decades apart and unfortunately that's why this book is such an important piece of literature. It reminded me in a lot of ways of The Trinity of Fundamentals in both subject and writing style.

[mark foster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unique novel. I found it took about half the book to really lock in to Antonious' style but it might also be that around halfway the plot also shifts into a more direct gear. Historically and culturally important, lots of dry humor, incredibly tragic and foreboding in light of the progressive oppression of Palestinians through the decades following publication, culminating in the present genocide. Not exactly a rip-roaring read and at a few moments I felt quite lost; by the end it felt more than worth it.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

written with a disregard for easy narrative flow that made even mundane table setting passages exciting to read. you read and realize you've jumped ahead in time three paragraphs ago or a conversation breaks from one pair of characters to another with no warning besides a gradual change in context. more cohesive than that sounds. the narrator and narrator's narrator combo is a joy to read.

jumbled to a purpose. trying to capture the lives of a people so often defined by victimhood. plays out the lives of cogs.

[Mitch · Rating 5 out of 5]

As much a dive into a kind of journalistic consciousness as it is a window into the devastating consequences of colonialism, how it transforms already evil people into cartoonishly evil shells of a person, how racism is threaded through every action, how relationships and human decency are incapable of flourishing in systems of oppression. The novel, the characters, bubble organically out of the book's comprehensive study of the British Mandate. So many jaw-dropping passages.

[trinity · Rating 3 out of 5]

NYRB Classics Book Club Pick for February 2026

An extremely interesting, and inherently topical, book centering Palestine with beautiful prose and a compelling storyline. I found the writing style challenging and sometimes difficult to navigate which timeline we are in. Ultimately, a heart-wrenching and gutting read.

[Colin McEnroe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The back cover description sold me on this: an obvious Christ figure, a mysterious, prophetic healer; so much potential for a rich character-driven story. But for me, it read more like a book of scenery than a book of people. Beautiful settings will never grab me the way compelling characters do, and these just didn't land.