What do you think?
Rate this book
I Can Imagine It for Us: A Palestinian Daughter's Memoir
A young woman’s search for connection with her estranged father, her family’s past, and the Palestinian homeland she can never visit
“Mai Serhan's writing is unique, sincere, dark, funny and cuttingly tragic.”—Selma Dabbagh
Mai Serhan was born in 1977 and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her father was expelled in 1948. She lives in Cairo with her Egyptian mother. Her distant and troubled father runs a mysterious business empire in China, and when he calls to tell her he doesn't have long to live, she joins him there in the hope of learning his trade and of finally getting close to him. However, Mai soon finds herself totally at traversing across a country as big as a continent, and as alien to her as her father. The ghosts of his past life come to haunt them both. They come with violence, with grief, bringing forth a tragic death, and a whole new meaning to the word erasure.
Told in a narrative as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this rich memoir spans Egypt and Lebanon to Dubai to China. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss, but also woven throughout with an understated humor and much grace.
“Mai Serhan's writing is unique, sincere, dark, funny and cuttingly tragic.”—Selma Dabbagh
Mai Serhan was born in 1977 and has never been to Palestine, the country from which her father was expelled in 1948. She lives in Cairo with her Egyptian mother. Her distant and troubled father runs a mysterious business empire in China, and when he calls to tell her he doesn't have long to live, she joins him there in the hope of learning his trade and of finally getting close to him. However, Mai soon finds herself totally at traversing across a country as big as a continent, and as alien to her as her father. The ghosts of his past life come to haunt them both. They come with violence, with grief, bringing forth a tragic death, and a whole new meaning to the word erasure.
Told in a narrative as befitting the splintered and disordered existence of exile over generations, this rich memoir spans Egypt and Lebanon to Dubai to China. It is filled with bitter tragedy and loss, but also woven throughout with an understated humor and much grace.
236 pages, Paperback
Published October 14, 2025
3 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 27, 2025
painful, inspiring, so many emotions all at once. mai is one of the best writers out there right now
October 18, 2025
The trauma of forced exile or expulsion from the land you only know as home is one that leaves you with a gaping wound.
It's the agonizing tormenting life of a tree severed from its land. Carried by violent storms to places it has never known and can't settle. It survives on air and drops of rain. A life suspended. Branches longing not into the direction of the sun, but towards its motherland. It lives but it does not grow nor does it bear the fruit it once bore so freely.
It's as if you have been torn away from your mother by the hands of a rapist. You live knowing where and who your mother is without being able to see her. Your life becomes an endless war with everything and everyone to heal. An endless longing for her touch, her smell, her warmth, her breath and her irreplaceable embrace. Your only cure is to return but it is a cure you can only imagine.
Mai Serhan's memoir, I Can Imagine It For Us, is a visceral palpable account of the crime of nakba and its countless wounds and victims. But she does more than imagines, she depicts and recounts to us what it means to be this victim and the daughter of one. She describes her ancestral village through the tales of her family members and the paradise and abundant bliss it once held. As a non Palestinian, one only imagined their plight. Mai's book transports you to it.
But there is another form of exile that runs in a strong parallel in her book. It is that of being a woman in an aggressively and violating patriarchal world that denies her access to different kinds of homes. The home a father could have been and the home one can be to oneself.
Or as she so painfully beautifully puts it;
"How far might you go when return becomes a place of no return?
How far might you go? When your name becomes a thing of air, weightless, restless.
When you seek home in all the fractures."
It's the agonizing tormenting life of a tree severed from its land. Carried by violent storms to places it has never known and can't settle. It survives on air and drops of rain. A life suspended. Branches longing not into the direction of the sun, but towards its motherland. It lives but it does not grow nor does it bear the fruit it once bore so freely.
It's as if you have been torn away from your mother by the hands of a rapist. You live knowing where and who your mother is without being able to see her. Your life becomes an endless war with everything and everyone to heal. An endless longing for her touch, her smell, her warmth, her breath and her irreplaceable embrace. Your only cure is to return but it is a cure you can only imagine.
Mai Serhan's memoir, I Can Imagine It For Us, is a visceral palpable account of the crime of nakba and its countless wounds and victims. But she does more than imagines, she depicts and recounts to us what it means to be this victim and the daughter of one. She describes her ancestral village through the tales of her family members and the paradise and abundant bliss it once held. As a non Palestinian, one only imagined their plight. Mai's book transports you to it.
But there is another form of exile that runs in a strong parallel in her book. It is that of being a woman in an aggressively and violating patriarchal world that denies her access to different kinds of homes. The home a father could have been and the home one can be to oneself.
Or as she so painfully beautifully puts it;
"How far might you go when return becomes a place of no return?
How far might you go? When your name becomes a thing of air, weightless, restless.
When you seek home in all the fractures."
January 23, 2026
Wow! I Can Imagine It for Us felt less like reading a memoir and more like sitting with someone who finally put words to things I’ve carried my whole life.
As a Palestinian daughter, so much of this hit home. The longing, the distance, the way you can feel tied to a place you’re not living in, yet it lives in you. Mai Serhan captured that beautifully. There were moments I had to stop and just sit with a sentence because it felt like she reached into memories I didn’t even know were still tender. What I loved most is how honest and soft the writing is. She brings you into her world without forcing anything. You feel the love she has for her family, and the complicated, layered relationship a lot of us have with “home.” Parts of it made me emotional in ways I didn’t expect. Not in a dramatic, heavy way, but in that quiet, familiar ache you feel when someone tells the truth out loud.
Beautifully written. Deeply relatable. And one of those books that stays with you after you close it. I’m really glad I read it.
As a Palestinian daughter, so much of this hit home. The longing, the distance, the way you can feel tied to a place you’re not living in, yet it lives in you. Mai Serhan captured that beautifully. There were moments I had to stop and just sit with a sentence because it felt like she reached into memories I didn’t even know were still tender. What I loved most is how honest and soft the writing is. She brings you into her world without forcing anything. You feel the love she has for her family, and the complicated, layered relationship a lot of us have with “home.” Parts of it made me emotional in ways I didn’t expect. Not in a dramatic, heavy way, but in that quiet, familiar ache you feel when someone tells the truth out loud.
Beautifully written. Deeply relatable. And one of those books that stays with you after you close it. I’m really glad I read it.
November 9, 2025
“I have never been to the place where I am from, but I can imagine it for us, Baba.”
I Can Imagine It For Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir, follows a young woman searching for connection with her estranged father, who is still trying to outrun his ghosts after being forced out of his Palestinian village in 1948. She travels from Egypt to Lebanon to China to Dubai, ultimately trying to piece together a picture of the one place she can’t visit: her homeland, Palestine. This is a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching memoir that questions the notion of the “perfect victim.” In breathtaking, lyrical language, Mai shows how trauma is passed through generations, how exile roots itself in our bones, and how for diasporic people, stories can become a homeland. A stunning achievement that everyone should read.
I Can Imagine It For Us: A Palestinian Daughter’s Memoir, follows a young woman searching for connection with her estranged father, who is still trying to outrun his ghosts after being forced out of his Palestinian village in 1948. She travels from Egypt to Lebanon to China to Dubai, ultimately trying to piece together a picture of the one place she can’t visit: her homeland, Palestine. This is a thought-provoking, heart-wrenching memoir that questions the notion of the “perfect victim.” In breathtaking, lyrical language, Mai shows how trauma is passed through generations, how exile roots itself in our bones, and how for diasporic people, stories can become a homeland. A stunning achievement that everyone should read.
November 15, 2025
I will come back to this memoir, again and again. It is full of charge, and stewardship. Mai is adept with words, and the story she tells is rife with grief, and tatters that she steadfastly weaves into an ode to her father, her ancestry, and the land. This is a stellar read.
November 8, 2025
A stunning, heart-wrenching memoir that requires multiple reads.
December 5, 2025
lezen lezen lezen!!
ma zoooo goed en mooi aaa
zeker een aanrader in deze tijden
ma zoooo goed en mooi aaa
zeker een aanrader in deze tijden
January 4, 2026
Candid, deep and eloquently written memoir.
January 25, 2026
I never related more to a book in my life. Truly heart wrenching but equally beautiful and raw!
November 22, 2025
A raw, unapologetic memoir of Mai Serhan and her Palestinian father, written through fragments of memory across continents and generations.
Mai Serhan’s story begins when her father calls her from China to tell her he’s been struggling with his health. What follows is a journey through her memories from Cairo to Beirut to Dubai to Shanghai, yet it always circles back to the place she’s never been to.. Palestine.
This isn’t just a memoir. It’s a reclamation of narrative, of memory, of identity. It’s a story about every Palestinian who has lived in their homeland through the stories and memories of others and through imagination.
For us Palestinians of the diaspora, this book feels like being seen.
Mai Serhan’s story begins when her father calls her from China to tell her he’s been struggling with his health. What follows is a journey through her memories from Cairo to Beirut to Dubai to Shanghai, yet it always circles back to the place she’s never been to.. Palestine.
This isn’t just a memoir. It’s a reclamation of narrative, of memory, of identity. It’s a story about every Palestinian who has lived in their homeland through the stories and memories of others and through imagination.
For us Palestinians of the diaspora, this book feels like being seen.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews