Welcome to Litsy!

I got this book second hand.
Someone has enthusiastically written (mostly underlining, plus a few comments) throughout. I feel like I'm back at school with one of the class copies of a set text.

Abu Sabir continued, dreamily, 'The first book I ever read was one I borrowed from Shaikh Radi. He was a man of such eloquence that you could listen to him talk for ever. We used to spend whole evenings listening to his wonderful stories...I once asked him where they all came from and he lent me a battered old book with yellowing pages. I polished it off in one evening. Next day I started on another, then another, then another.

Oh Mother, he thought, you're an angel and I'm a lion. But who'll look after you when I die? There's no escaping death. And perhaps there'll be prison, torture, mad dogs. But no matter; there's no alternative. We're dedicated to a cause. When it happens you'll say your son died a martyr. And that he was a true 'lion'.

A beautifully written, never-ending tragedy set in Palestine. A place where hope has no home and the only choice is which hopeless death you claim.

This is AMAZING so far....

This was a book I picked up when trying to do a reader challenge where you read an author with the same name as you...This is the only book with either my first or last name in the author name. Turned out to be a good one though!

I'm going to start chronicling the books from Arab writers I've read over the years; universally, the prose (even in translation) is unparalleled. Wild Thorns was one of the first novels to showcase tragedies & absurdities of life during war in the occupied West Bank from both sides of the conflict.