Weaving together themes of sickness, statelessness, and intergenerational trauma with poignant, understated humor and grace, Serhans story moves through pre-1948 Palestine, modern day Cairo, and China at the brink of globalization. At each point, she navigates a world fraught with heartbreak, loss, and the innate human drive to hold onto our families, even long after theyve fallen apart.Najla Said, author ofLooking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family
Mai Serhan's writing is unique, sincere, dark, funny and cuttingly tragic. Her memoir will stay with me for a long time. There are facets of Palestinian-ness if you can define it as such a thing that are so clearly identifiable to me and yet so rare to see in literature.Selma Dabbagh,author of Out of It and editor of We Wrote in Symbols: Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers
To accompany Mai Serhan across the times and spaces of injury and dispossession, to bear the pain of limbs and land lost, to weather the impossibility of return, to excavate the depths of all that we have and all that we have lost, is a salve on the open wound of what it means to be Palestinian. This brave and beautiful book is a gift and an invitation, to remember, to create, to persist, and most of all to love.Sherene Seikaly, author of Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy In Mandate Palestine
Utterly gripping from its opening, Serhans lyrical prose pulsates with love, rage and longing as it traces her complicated relationship with her father, across borders and far from their origin home in Palestine. Deeply moving and urgent, it reminds us just how much Palestinians have lost through displacement while speaking to extraordinary bonds to land and family.Julie Wheelwright, author of Sisters In Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium
"It is profoundly moving to read this intimate narrative, one thread in the vast tapestry of Palestines history. Told through the eyes of a second-generation Palestinian in the diasporathose who inherit exile not through direct memory, but through its enduring aftermath. Though their Nakba may differ in form from that of their parents, its imprint is no less profound."Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, author of You Can Be The Last Leaf
