by
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction
Spanning the collapse of Ottoman rule and the British Mandate in Palestine, this is the story of three generations of a defiant family from the Palestinian village of Hadiya before 1948.
Through the lives of Mahmud, elder of Hadiya, his son Khaled, and Khaled’s grandson Naji, we enter the life of a tribe whose fate is decided by one colonizer after another. Khaled’s remarkable white mare, Hamama, and her descendants feel and share the family’s struggles and as a siege grips Hadiya, it falls to Khaled to save his people from a descending tyranny.
Review
"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
About the Author
- Publisher : Hoopoe Press; (2016)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 664 pages
- ISBN-13 :
- 978-977-416-757-7