Sweeping saga of key moments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Revered author and poet, Ibrahim Nasrallah is considered one of the most influential Arab voices of his generation. Born and raised in a Jordanian refugee camp to Palestinian parents, he went on to become a journalist before turning to his writing full time. His work includes numerous poetry collections, literary criticism and fourteen novels. In 2009 he was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. He lives and works in Amman, Jordan.An award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic literature, Nancy Roberts' recent translations include key works by Naguib Mahfouz, Hala El-Badry, Ghadda Samman, Mohamed el-Bisatie and Salwa Bakr. She lives and works in Amman, Jordan.
"Nasrallah paints a vivid portrait of the idiosyncratic villagers .
. . . Roberts's translation is excellent."--Peter Clark, Times
Literary Supplement
"You soon realize the power of Nasrallah's novel. Any notion that
this is just nostalgic reverie is dispelled . . . Nasrallah's
intensely eloquent voice gives Western audiences an insight into
the lives of the marginalized without rattling off numbers."--Tam
Hussein, New Statesman
"Men are murdered or executed, demolitions and collective
punishment meted out, ancestral lands taken at a stroke. One learns
the lesson that the behavior of any oppressor is the same,
regardless of time or circumstance."--Norbert Hirschhorn, Banipal
Magazine
"I turned these pages with trepidation for nearly a month,
sometimes holding my breath and swallowing hard. I was reading the
unfolding of my own life, and the lives of all Palestinians. I knew
what was going to happen and in the strange ways of a heart touched
by literature, I wanted to warn the characters."--Susan
Abulhawa
"[Nasrallah] conveys a powerful sense of the textures of place,
time and custom . . . With the publication of Time of White Horses,
lovingly translated by Nancy Roberts, our understanding of the
history of modern Arabic literature has taken a giant leap
forward."--Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada
"The measure of the greatness of this book is its humility in
approaching a people's vast experiences and rituals across this
long stretch of time between Ottoman and British then Israeli
occupation, as Nasrallah deftly narrates this community's character
within a specific locale and around the acts of the novel's hero,
Khaled, whose reflections and deeds ennoble the lives of each
successive generation. That Nasrallah's writing evokes this epic
grandeur in discrete, alluring, lyric chapters, one story
seamlessly weaving into another, is even more compelling: the long
novel enlightens us in flash fictions which illuminate each other
and sustain our attention."--Benjamin Hollander, Warscapes
"Time of White Horses charts the history of three generations of a
Palestinian family in a small village, Jordanian author Ibrahim
Nasrallah's saga is a descendant of a genre introduced into Arabic
fiction by Naguib Mahfouz's famous Cairo Trilogy. Through the lives
of the members of this family, Nasrallah depicts the tragedy of a
whole nation under changing historical circumstances: the Ottoman
rule, the British Mandate and the Nakba (the catastrophe of the
Jewish occupation of Palestinian land in 1948) to the expulsion of
the Palestinians and finally the post-Nakba era."--Judges
Committee, International Prize for Arabic Fiction
"Time of White Horses rewrites the crisis of Palestinian
representation--the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of
historical narrative--in the form of historical fiction."--Karim
Mattar, Journal of Postcolonial Writing
"Written in a shimmering and sensitive style, it has a captivating
grip on the reader, a lasting effect on his/her sensibility and
memory. This is the greatest creative portrayal which explains,
through fine art, the tragedy of the Palestinian people and the
causes of their disaster."--Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Founder and
Director of East-West Nexus for Studies and Research and of PROTA,
Project of Translation from Arabic
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