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Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
by Nathan Thrall
Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.
Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad's fate. It is every parent's worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed's quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.
In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama Nathan Thrall, hailed for his "severe allergy to conventional wisdom" (Time), offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.
Pulitzer Prize, 2024
"Journalist Thrall (The Only Language They Understand) offers a unique window onto the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this captivating profile...It's a heart-wrenching portrait of an unequal society." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An eye-opening and empathetic analysis of a profoundly personal tragedy. This deeply researched book is insightful as the author reveals the complex issues faced by Palestinians." —Library Journal (starred review)
"A powerful study...A moving, often maddening portrait of the dire life straits of Palestinians in Israel." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Nathan Thrall's book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions."
―Arundhati Roy, Booker Prizewinning author of My Seditious Heart
"It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall's evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heartbreaking."
―Adam Hochschild, National Book Award finalist and author of American Midnight
"This brilliant and heartbreaking book is a masterpiece. It reads like a novel, yet is all sadly true. I finished it in tears."
―James Rebanks, New York Times bestselling author of Pastoral Song
"In this luminous story of Palestinians striving to live under Israeli rule, there is much cruelty. But there is also great love―of parents for their children, of lovers for their beloved, and of people for their home. This book is transformative."
―André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me By Your Name
This information about A Day in the Life of Abed Salama was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His essays, reviews, and reported features have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books, and have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. Originally from California, he lives in Jerusalem.
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