Books about Palestine
History, memoir, fiction and poetry by Palestinian, Israeli and other writers. Books used in the history chapters also appear on the sources page. The rest offer other ways into the subject, through personal accounts, novels and poems.
History & politics
Accounts of how Palestine got to where it is, from historians and political writers across the spectrum of opinion.
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Rashid Khalidi, 2020
A history of the conflict told through six defining episodes and three generations of one Palestinian family, drawing on the author's own family archive.
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Ilan Pappe, 2006
An Israeli historian's account of the 1948 expulsions, drawing on newly opened Israeli military archives. Contested: other historians who have read the same archives describe the same events in less deliberate terms.
The Question of Palestine Edward Said, 1979
An early and influential statement of the Palestinian case for an English-language audience, from the literary critic and public intellectual.
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama Nathan Thrall, 2023
A single 2012 bus crash near Jerusalem, and the maze of permits, checkpoints and jurisdictions a Palestinian father has to navigate to reach his injured son. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Memoir & testimony
First-person accounts of life under occupation, exile and war.
Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape Raja Shehadeh, 2007
Six walks through the hills around Ramallah over 26 years, watching the landscape close under settlement and checkpoint. Winner of the Orwell Prize.
In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story Ghada Karmi, 2002
A memoir of childhood in Jerusalem before 1948, exile in London, and a fraught return decades later.
Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide Atef Abu Saif, 2024
A Gaza-based writer's diary of the war's first months, written from inside it while displaced with his family.
Fiction
Novels and short fiction, some of it foundational to Palestinian literature and some of it very recent.
Men in the Sun Ghassan Kanafani, 1963
A short novel about three refugees smuggled across the desert to Kuwait in an empty water tanker, foundational to modern Palestinian literature.
Mornings in Jenin Susan Abulhawa, 2010
A multigenerational family saga spanning 1948 to the second intifada, following one family displaced from their village near Haifa.
Minor Detail Adania Shibli, 2020
A novel linking a 1949 atrocity to a present-day search for the truth about it. Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Enter Ghost Isabella Hammad, 2023
A London-based actress returns to Haifa and joins a West Bank production of Hamlet, staged across the fault lines of occupation.
Poetry
Palestinian poets, in translation and in English.
Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems Mahmoud Darwish, 2003
A representative selection from Palestine's national poet, translated by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza Mosab Abu Toha, 2022
Poems written in and about Gaza before the current war, by a poet and librarian. Winner of the Palestine Book Award; finalist for the National Book Award.