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Dreams of Ayn Ara
A surreal portrait of the Nakba as never-ending, lived and relived by one displaced Palestinian family.
In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.
Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic — culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.
Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.
In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.
Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic — culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.
Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.
150 pages, Paperback
Published August 18, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 22, 2026
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.
Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic—culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.
Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.
Under 150pp telling most of a hundred years of historical dispossession, repression, genocide sounds...and is...ambitious, requiring time-jumps and dreaming visitations and other such narrative flummery that distracts from the core of the story: My home was forcibly taken from me. I do not have access to my family's source of identity. I live in a world without my roots, epiphytically resting on the place I am without a way to reach into it and root myself in welcoming soil.
It is ever and always the problem of the Othered. It is the reason ghettos exist, for the inhabitants; the sounds and smells of home plopped atop foreign soil. For the foreign-soil owners, it's crowd control, easy honeytrapping concentration without the bad optics of the word "camp." Not like this Palestinian family in these pages escaped the spaces where the word "camp" was le mot juste for what they were confined to. It's appalling that those confining them there were themselves the survivors or children of survivors of the same treatment....
Stories like this are proof that generational trauma is real. Damage done in malice survives and thrives and metastasizes and entumors its poisons like the body does when protecting itself. Stories like this are the pearl versions of the tumor-forming process, wrapping severed bits of essence in layer upon layer of nacreous story.
It's not long, it's not exhaustively researched and fact-checked. It's the living memory of a family victimized to redress wrongs done by others, done to strangers, and made into their problem by colonizers. Tale as old as time, then.
The Publisher Says: In Stockholm, Zein al-Abedin shivers, far from the warmth of simmering revolt years ago in Shatila. In Paris, his son Nidal toils in solitude, ignoring his father’s phone calls and dousing his desire for Bassam back in Lebanon. Salwa, refusing to leave Beirut for Sweden, digs backward in time through Facebook and discovers an unlikely channel to the one place in the world she can’t go: Ayn Ara, the Abu Sukkar family’s ancestral home in Palestine.
Invoking the long wake of the 1948 Nakba and its displacement of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, Sara Abou Ghazal webs the worldwide, timewide scatter of the Abu Sukkar family. At every turn, Ayn Ara disrupts their otherwise “normal” days in new terrains through memory, pain, and strange magic—culminating with a journey into both the past and a parallel present of Zionist settler violence.
Be it through a ghostly return to the brutal event of the Nakba, or grandmother Nijmeh’s psychic drift from land to no-land and back, Dreams of Ayn Ara portrays time as a false phenomenon for people ripped from their rightful place—and points to fissures in the fragile reality that denies Palestine to Palestinians.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.
Under 150pp telling most of a hundred years of historical dispossession, repression, genocide sounds...and is...ambitious, requiring time-jumps and dreaming visitations and other such narrative flummery that distracts from the core of the story: My home was forcibly taken from me. I do not have access to my family's source of identity. I live in a world without my roots, epiphytically resting on the place I am without a way to reach into it and root myself in welcoming soil.
It is ever and always the problem of the Othered. It is the reason ghettos exist, for the inhabitants; the sounds and smells of home plopped atop foreign soil. For the foreign-soil owners, it's crowd control, easy honeytrapping concentration without the bad optics of the word "camp." Not like this Palestinian family in these pages escaped the spaces where the word "camp" was le mot juste for what they were confined to. It's appalling that those confining them there were themselves the survivors or children of survivors of the same treatment....
Stories like this are proof that generational trauma is real. Damage done in malice survives and thrives and metastasizes and entumors its poisons like the body does when protecting itself. Stories like this are the pearl versions of the tumor-forming process, wrapping severed bits of essence in layer upon layer of nacreous story.
It's not long, it's not exhaustively researched and fact-checked. It's the living memory of a family victimized to redress wrongs done by others, done to strangers, and made into their problem by colonizers. Tale as old as time, then.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
How does one, as a Palestinian, keep writing about the intergenerational trauma of a perpetual displacement in a new way? Insert Ihlam Ya Sidi.
Sara Abou Ghazal’s Dreams of Ayn Ara (Arabic, 2022; tr. Katharine Halls, 2026) follows the family of Zein al-Abidin, who leaves the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon with his wife Zahra; their son Nidal, who also leaves and settles abroad; and their youngest Salwa, who stays behind, preparing to join them.
Each chapter shifts perspective, and each character relates to Palestine and to the idea of “home” differently, but all are quietly connected through a grandfather killed in 1948, who visits them in dreams. We also hear from the grandmother, whose dreams and stories tell us how she reached Shatila after the death of her husband.
Memory and dream blur in this novel until it’s hard to tell which is which. Ayn Ara itself is an invented place (though, is it really? the novel questions), unlike Shatila, which is real.
When the novel reaches the grandfather’s chapter, who speaks from the dead, the line between reality and imagination disappears completely. “What matters,” he says, “is that we keep telling the story.” So, Salwa is chosen to carry it; she witnesses everything in her dreams until she “come[s] back to the land of the dead, and remember[s] everything, and cr[ies] feeling sorry for myself all over again.”
This is a beautifully written (and translated) novel about remembering and forgetting, why we remember, and why we forget. The grandfather himself becomes a symbol of Palestine, that which must never be forgotten. But the novel complicates this narrative too and asks: how does one keep remembering when what must be remembered is pain?
This novel is short (around 160 pgs), and that is my only criticism—I was expecting a family saga like Hala Alyan’s The Arsonist City (2021). But the novel’s form clearly reflects the unpredictability and lack of resolution that permeate the Palestinian diasporic condition, so it all makes sense. An important read.
Sara Abou Ghazal’s Dreams of Ayn Ara (Arabic, 2022; tr. Katharine Halls, 2026) follows the family of Zein al-Abidin, who leaves the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon with his wife Zahra; their son Nidal, who also leaves and settles abroad; and their youngest Salwa, who stays behind, preparing to join them.
Each chapter shifts perspective, and each character relates to Palestine and to the idea of “home” differently, but all are quietly connected through a grandfather killed in 1948, who visits them in dreams. We also hear from the grandmother, whose dreams and stories tell us how she reached Shatila after the death of her husband.
Memory and dream blur in this novel until it’s hard to tell which is which. Ayn Ara itself is an invented place (though, is it really? the novel questions), unlike Shatila, which is real.
When the novel reaches the grandfather’s chapter, who speaks from the dead, the line between reality and imagination disappears completely. “What matters,” he says, “is that we keep telling the story.” So, Salwa is chosen to carry it; she witnesses everything in her dreams until she “come[s] back to the land of the dead, and remember[s] everything, and cr[ies] feeling sorry for myself all over again.”
This is a beautifully written (and translated) novel about remembering and forgetting, why we remember, and why we forget. The grandfather himself becomes a symbol of Palestine, that which must never be forgotten. But the novel complicates this narrative too and asks: how does one keep remembering when what must be remembered is pain?
This novel is short (around 160 pgs), and that is my only criticism—I was expecting a family saga like Hala Alyan’s The Arsonist City (2021). But the novel’s form clearly reflects the unpredictability and lack of resolution that permeate the Palestinian diasporic condition, so it all makes sense. An important read.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
[Copy provided by publisher]
READ IF YOU LIKE...
• Examining the weight that Palestinians carry
• Remembering the story of ancestors
• Delving into one family from multiple perspectives
I THOUGHT IT WAS...
An insightful look into the legacy of Nakba and how Palestinian heritage affects different generations. The Abu Sukkar family now live far from their ancestral homeland, but the memories are always at hand. Father, son, mother, daughter, and grandparents all take turns sharing their stories.
I've read accounts of how devastating Nakba was but less about the strange dissonance and complexity of being Palestine for the generations that have come after. This is part of what this novel explores, the awkwardness of wanting to distance yourself from your roots while others admire, respect, or even seemingly covet your heritage. It's like receiving street cred for something you never directly experienced, and it's also an experience you innately try to run from because to embrace means trying to comprehend unfathomable pain and sorrow.
But that's the other part of what this novel challenges its characters to do: remember. Grandfathers speak to granddaughters through dreams, literally showing them how they were executed, how their grandmother and father clung to survival in a mad dash to escape. Remembrance and memory permeate every single family member's narrative in this novel, with flashbacks within flashbacks that can make the thread hard to follow. But Ghazal's main point is clear: A rift as violent as this haunts its people forever.
READ IF YOU LIKE...
• Examining the weight that Palestinians carry
• Remembering the story of ancestors
• Delving into one family from multiple perspectives
I THOUGHT IT WAS...
An insightful look into the legacy of Nakba and how Palestinian heritage affects different generations. The Abu Sukkar family now live far from their ancestral homeland, but the memories are always at hand. Father, son, mother, daughter, and grandparents all take turns sharing their stories.
I've read accounts of how devastating Nakba was but less about the strange dissonance and complexity of being Palestine for the generations that have come after. This is part of what this novel explores, the awkwardness of wanting to distance yourself from your roots while others admire, respect, or even seemingly covet your heritage. It's like receiving street cred for something you never directly experienced, and it's also an experience you innately try to run from because to embrace means trying to comprehend unfathomable pain and sorrow.
But that's the other part of what this novel challenges its characters to do: remember. Grandfathers speak to granddaughters through dreams, literally showing them how they were executed, how their grandmother and father clung to survival in a mad dash to escape. Remembrance and memory permeate every single family member's narrative in this novel, with flashbacks within flashbacks that can make the thread hard to follow. But Ghazal's main point is clear: A rift as violent as this haunts its people forever.
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
"Dreams of Ayn Ara" by Sara Abou Ghazal (tr: Katharine Halls) follows a Palestinian who was displaced after the Nakba, finding themselves arriving at the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon before ending up in Stockholm.
Through the POVs of the family members, readers learn of the characters' struggles that often plague Palestinians in similar situations: the loss of their native home and land as they are stripped of their rights, the indignity of being placed in a refugee camp in a land that treats you as barely humans, and the conflicting feelings of wanting to return to a homeland you've never been to vs. moving on and building a life in a different country.As with most literature revolving around such topics, this is a hard-hitting and emotional read. I appreciated the different, nuanced perspectives offered as the author gives each character their due to play their part in the story, which is drawn from her own family's lived-in experience.
Now that the world leaders & one-percenters are becoming more determined to control the propaganda around current events, it is more important than ever for readers to bear witness to such stories. "Dreams of Ayn Ara" is a reminder that reading will forever be political. Viva la resistance.
Thank you to @thefeministpress for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Through the POVs of the family members, readers learn of the characters' struggles that often plague Palestinians in similar situations: the loss of their native home and land as they are stripped of their rights, the indignity of being placed in a refugee camp in a land that treats you as barely humans, and the conflicting feelings of wanting to return to a homeland you've never been to vs. moving on and building a life in a different country.As with most literature revolving around such topics, this is a hard-hitting and emotional read. I appreciated the different, nuanced perspectives offered as the author gives each character their due to play their part in the story, which is drawn from her own family's lived-in experience.
Now that the world leaders & one-percenters are becoming more determined to control the propaganda around current events, it is more important than ever for readers to bear witness to such stories. "Dreams of Ayn Ara" is a reminder that reading will forever be political. Viva la resistance.
Thank you to @thefeministpress for the e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.
September 25, 2026
Thank you to Mercier Press for providing me with an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.
The ghost of the Nakba is present throughout the story of the Abu Sakkar family, displaced from Palestine and now splintered throughout the world. Each chapter of the book follows one family member as they grapple with what it means to be Palestinian in a world that sees them as either worthless or tools to be used for political or personal use.
I was particularly fond of grandmother Nijmeh and the way her story is told in sudden bursts and glimpses. I was also fascinated by the non-Palestinian characters that wanted to tokenise or even inhabit the identity of a Palestinian without truly reckoning with the reality of what it means to be Palestinian. The writing here is sharp and the prose takes some experimental turns that I believe pay off well.
Sara Abou Ghazal has written a haunting and reflective tale of exile and belonging. An important addition to the bookshelf of any reader wanting to explore Palestinian authors and stories.
Translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls. Thank you to the publisher for bringing this important book to the hands of English readers!
The ghost of the Nakba is present throughout the story of the Abu Sakkar family, displaced from Palestine and now splintered throughout the world. Each chapter of the book follows one family member as they grapple with what it means to be Palestinian in a world that sees them as either worthless or tools to be used for political or personal use.
I was particularly fond of grandmother Nijmeh and the way her story is told in sudden bursts and glimpses. I was also fascinated by the non-Palestinian characters that wanted to tokenise or even inhabit the identity of a Palestinian without truly reckoning with the reality of what it means to be Palestinian. The writing here is sharp and the prose takes some experimental turns that I believe pay off well.
Sara Abou Ghazal has written a haunting and reflective tale of exile and belonging. An important addition to the bookshelf of any reader wanting to explore Palestinian authors and stories.
Translated from Arabic by Katharine Halls. Thank you to the publisher for bringing this important book to the hands of English readers!
Review of advance copy received from Edelweiss+
I think im finally ready to review this book.
Dreams of Ayn Ara by Sara Abughuzal is one of the most emotionally devastating and powerful books I have read in a long time. As a Palestinian writer and feminist, Abu Ghazal refuses to soften the realities of displacement and generational trauma. So she quite literally slams everything down on the table and forces the reader to confront the never-ending nightmare that Palestinians in exile have endured for generations.
The novel follows Abu Sukkar’s family after their displacement from Ayn Ara, Palestine, then the second time after Sabra and Shatila massacre in their refugee camp, Lebanon. We are essentially following decades of the memory of displacement and trauma.
At the center of it all is Zayn al-Abideen, whose life is shaped by an ongoing identity crisis and existential struggle. We are following him through his memories of Ayn Ara, of Shatila, of his attempts to build a life beyond the camp, and his relationships with his wife, Salwa, his mother, Nijmeh, and his son, Nidal.
We are witnessing the whole emotional load of carrying a homeland that exists in his memory.
And I’ll tell you something… all of this will shatter your heart. I remember one time, after Iftar, I was sitting with my mom in the living room when i genuinely burst out crying. Lmao, im sorry my mom had to witness that, poor woman was confused 😭.
Anyway…
The novel also follows Salwa, Zayn al-Abideen's wife, whose fierce anger and rage stands in contrast to her husband's calm and measured personality. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the tension between them. Zayn is very cool headed, but Salwa is explosive. You know, I really still wonder how they managed to stay together for so long.
And the absolutely brilliant thing that Abu Ghazal’s highlights here is that their reactions and their stark differences come from the same source; the exhaustion and frustration of living in exile while holding generational trauma.
You know what else makes Dreams of Ayn Ara so good??? It’s that it refuses to focus only on one perspective, which is a really nice thing to see in fiction works like this. You’d notice that every member of the family carries a different relationship to Palestine and belonging. We follow Zayn al-Abideen’s mother, Nijmeh, whose life is haunted by loss. She’s also in a state where her memories of the past and current present are somewhat blurring, and it’s genuinely one of the saddest things in this book. To witness her breakdowns, her fears of gunshot, it’s just beyond words.
But maybe the character who fascinated me most was Nidal. Unlike the older generations, he never saw Palestine. He was born into exile. Lebanon is the only world he has ever known. We see him earning his nursing scholarship, his interactions with Lebanese society, hes far from the refugee camps and the communities that raised him. And this access to these privileges (if that’s a correct term to use here) comes with a cost, a great one too. Nidal finds himself hiding parts of who he is, suppressing his accent, avoiding conversations about his background, and distancing himself from anything that might reveal his identity as a Palestinian refugee. His struggle is so so so so devastating. I feel for this guy so much. He’s in a state where he has to erase parts of himself in order to survive in this world. There’s this one quote that i still remember that said:
”Nidal's existence was fractured into multiple personalities, multiple lives. The explosion reduced these to a single imperative: leave."
That single sentence literally encapsulates Nidal. (And many other refugees around the world.)
I think I made it clear long ago that I do not shy away from being personal in reviews about books like this. So as someone whose father grew up in refugee camps across different countries, including Lebanon where he was born, this novel made me ugly cry, for many reasons, one of them is how the world will shut its doors in your face the moment it knows you’re a refugee. I know how my father was rejected from jobs and colleges due to the fact that he’s Palestinian. How he never got to own and to be just because of this label - ‘refugee’.
By the end of this book, I found myself searching for relief. I wanted some reassurance that the racism, violence, and dehumanization refugees endure would eventually come to an end. I wanted to believe that after generations of displacement, the doors would finally open. But that’s not the case in our reality.
The experiences of Abu Sukkar’s family is the same experience of millions of families today. Refugees are still treated as temporary people.
_____
12/apr - i genuinely cannot stop thinking about this book.
25/feb - i don’t yet have the language for what this book did to me. I’ll write a full review when I do. RTC :)
Dreams of Ayn Ara by Sara Abughuzal is one of the most emotionally devastating and powerful books I have read in a long time. As a Palestinian writer and feminist, Abu Ghazal refuses to soften the realities of displacement and generational trauma. So she quite literally slams everything down on the table and forces the reader to confront the never-ending nightmare that Palestinians in exile have endured for generations.
The novel follows Abu Sukkar’s family after their displacement from Ayn Ara, Palestine, then the second time after Sabra and Shatila massacre in their refugee camp, Lebanon. We are essentially following decades of the memory of displacement and trauma.
At the center of it all is Zayn al-Abideen, whose life is shaped by an ongoing identity crisis and existential struggle. We are following him through his memories of Ayn Ara, of Shatila, of his attempts to build a life beyond the camp, and his relationships with his wife, Salwa, his mother, Nijmeh, and his son, Nidal.
We are witnessing the whole emotional load of carrying a homeland that exists in his memory.
And I’ll tell you something… all of this will shatter your heart. I remember one time, after Iftar, I was sitting with my mom in the living room when i genuinely burst out crying. Lmao, im sorry my mom had to witness that, poor woman was confused 😭.
Anyway…
The novel also follows Salwa, Zayn al-Abideen's wife, whose fierce anger and rage stands in contrast to her husband's calm and measured personality. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is the tension between them. Zayn is very cool headed, but Salwa is explosive. You know, I really still wonder how they managed to stay together for so long.
And the absolutely brilliant thing that Abu Ghazal’s highlights here is that their reactions and their stark differences come from the same source; the exhaustion and frustration of living in exile while holding generational trauma.
You know what else makes Dreams of Ayn Ara so good??? It’s that it refuses to focus only on one perspective, which is a really nice thing to see in fiction works like this. You’d notice that every member of the family carries a different relationship to Palestine and belonging. We follow Zayn al-Abideen’s mother, Nijmeh, whose life is haunted by loss. She’s also in a state where her memories of the past and current present are somewhat blurring, and it’s genuinely one of the saddest things in this book. To witness her breakdowns, her fears of gunshot, it’s just beyond words.
But maybe the character who fascinated me most was Nidal. Unlike the older generations, he never saw Palestine. He was born into exile. Lebanon is the only world he has ever known. We see him earning his nursing scholarship, his interactions with Lebanese society, hes far from the refugee camps and the communities that raised him. And this access to these privileges (if that’s a correct term to use here) comes with a cost, a great one too. Nidal finds himself hiding parts of who he is, suppressing his accent, avoiding conversations about his background, and distancing himself from anything that might reveal his identity as a Palestinian refugee. His struggle is so so so so devastating. I feel for this guy so much. He’s in a state where he has to erase parts of himself in order to survive in this world. There’s this one quote that i still remember that said:
”Nidal's existence was fractured into multiple personalities, multiple lives. The explosion reduced these to a single imperative: leave."
That single sentence literally encapsulates Nidal. (And many other refugees around the world.)
I think I made it clear long ago that I do not shy away from being personal in reviews about books like this. So as someone whose father grew up in refugee camps across different countries, including Lebanon where he was born, this novel made me ugly cry, for many reasons, one of them is how the world will shut its doors in your face the moment it knows you’re a refugee. I know how my father was rejected from jobs and colleges due to the fact that he’s Palestinian. How he never got to own and to be just because of this label - ‘refugee’.
By the end of this book, I found myself searching for relief. I wanted some reassurance that the racism, violence, and dehumanization refugees endure would eventually come to an end. I wanted to believe that after generations of displacement, the doors would finally open. But that’s not the case in our reality.
The experiences of Abu Sukkar’s family is the same experience of millions of families today. Refugees are still treated as temporary people.
_____
12/apr - i genuinely cannot stop thinking about this book.
25/feb - i don’t yet have the language for what this book did to me. I’ll write a full review when I do. RTC :)
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