Publishers Weekly
06/08/2020
Abulhawa (The Blue Between Sky and Water) charts a Palestinian woman’s gradual turn to sex work followed by violent resistance against Israeli settlers in this tragic and engrossing work. Middle-aged Nahr, the narrator, is in solitary confinement at an Israeli prison, where she recounts her life story. Born in Kuwait to Palestinian exiles in 1967 and named Yaqoot after her father’s mistress, Nahr grows up with her mother, brother Jehad, and overbearing paternal grandmother. In 1985, she marries the gruff Mhammad, who abandons her two years later. Shortly after, Nahr meets a woman at a friend’s wedding, who manipulates her into prostitution, which Nahr continues doing to help finance Jehad’s education. When anti-Palestinian sentiment ramps up following the expulsion of the invading Iraqis in 1991, Jehad is arrested and tortured for collaboration, and the family flees to Jordan. The 1995 Oslo Accords allow Nahr to travel to Palestine and secure a divorce from Mhammad, and there she witnesses the injustices levied against Palestinians and joins in escalating acts of resistance until the eruption of the Second Intifada leads to serious danger. Abulhawa demonstrates the effect of trauma and helplessness on Nahr and others, leading them to violence. The detailed explorations of a woman’s pain and desperate measures make this lush story stand out. Agent: Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary). (Aug.)
GMA.com
From the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which made her a refugee, to jilted love, poverty, prostitution, a trek through Jordan, and falling in love, Nahr’s life unfolds in twists and turns, told beautifully by the internationally bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin.
Ms. Magazine
Palestinian-American writer and political activist Susan Abulhawa has given us another powerful novel, this one of a woman’s fight against misogyny and oppression to find hope and meaning in the darkest of times.
Book Reporter
A remarkable story filled with lyrical prose and breathtaking humanity.
Saleem Haddad
A powerful and expansive story of love, resistance, and the search for freedom. Abulhawa’s characters are raw, unapologetic, and unforgettable.
New York Times Book Review
Abulhawa has created a spirited protagonist who lives invisibly and in opposition to her ‘loveless world,’ telling her own story on her own terms.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
This utterly compelling novel of love, passion, and politics is also a story of personal and revolutionary awakening. Susan Abulhawa weaves a thrilling account of Nahr and her life—from young girl to independent woman—into the larger tapestry of Palestinian dispossession and resistance. Formed through the calamitous experiences of invasion, war, occupation, and sexual exploitation, Nahr becomes a political prisoner who is yet free in her own mind. An agent of history and a full-fledged subject of her own existence, Nahr stands at the center of Abulhawa’s ambitious epic.
Marc Lamont Hill
Against the Loveless World is a masterpiece! As she does with every book, Susan Abulhawa paints stunningly beautiful and humanizing images of Palestinian women as they navigate the violence of settler-colonial oppression with dignity and agency. With this novel, she also forces us to wrestle with the complexities of love, freedom, struggle, and shame in ways that both inspire and challenge our very conceptions of what it means to be human. This is a major literary contribution that further cements Abulhawa’s status as one of the most important writers of our generation.
New Yorker
[A]t its heart, Abulhawa’s novel is a love story . . . but this is a love story that cannot escape its geography, and Abulhawa elegantly crafts a world where the tension between desire and survival is laid bare.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A meditation on love and alienation in a setting that is by nature political [. . .] Exhilarating and contemplative.
CNN.com
This is one masterfully written story you won’t be able to put down.
Mint Press News
Susan Abulhawa’s writing has the rare quality of allowing us to hear the sound, taste the flavor, smell the fragrance, and feel the pulse of Palestine. She offers a rare insight and we would be foolish not to accept it.
Booklist
In this moving and nuanced novel, Abulhawa takes a hard look at the inheritance of exile and the intersection of the political with the personal, as Nahr’s story reveals the complexity beneath the simple narratives told on both sides of a deep divide.
Fatima Bhutto
A thrilling, defiant novel. Abulhawa’s latest novel reads as a riot act against oppression, misogyny, and shame.
Ahdaf Soueif
A fearless work of imagination and documentary.
Michael Palin
Nahr is a wonderful creation, strong-willed, passionate, unapologetic, and adventurous. Her refusal to accept the subordination expected of her propels the story at a thrilling pace. Her determination to find love in a loveless world and her unquenchable spirit in adversity shines a ray of hope into some very dark places.
Shelf Awareness
Through Nahr, Abulhawa seamlessly, affectingly parallels Palestine's brutal, occupied history during the last half-century, humanizing headlines with names, families, dates, memories that belong to people with whom readers can identity, believe, empathize, mourn and ultimately, albeit tentatively, celebrate.
Alice Walker
Susan Abulhawa possesses the heart of a warrior; she looks into the darkest crevices of lives, conflicts, horrendous injustices, and dares to shine light that can illuminate hidden worlds for us, who are too often oblivious. A major writer of our time, to read Abulhawa is to begin to understand not simply the misinformation we have received for decades about what has gone on in Palestine and the Middle East, but to come to terms with our own resistance to feeling the terror of our own fear of Truth.
Apartment Therapy
Against the Loveless World gives readers a lens that focuses on the experience of a woman trying to assimilate into Palestinian culture as she moves forward to find a better life, the one she always dreamed of.
Library Journal
03/01/2020
World renowned for Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian American author Abulhawa pits herself Against the Loveless World, with protagonist Nahr born in 1970s Kuwait to Palestinian refugees, growing up disappointed in life and love, flushed out of Kuwait by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and temporarily ensconced in Jordan before circling back to Palestine, where she ends up in solitary confinement. Called a Dr. Zhivago of Iran by Margaret Atwood, Iranian Canadian Hozar's Aria features a redheaded, blue-eyed baby girl rescued by an illiterate driver in Tehran and eventually passed on to multiple homes until the 1979 revolution ignites while she is at university. Short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Syrian author Wannous's The Frightened Ones opens with Suleima beginning a tentative relationship with mysterious novelist Nassim, then agreeing to take custody of his new manuscript when he flees to Germany. She's soon shocked to discover how much her life looks like that of the novel's protagonist, who even acts here as an alternate narrator.
