In July, as Israel carried out its “Final Solution,” an operation aimed at the physical destruction of Palestinians through mass starvation, I was invited to take part in a panel that imagined the future of a liberated Palestine. The event was polarizing: For some, it was ill-timed; for others, it offered a glimpse of hope. For me, it was a tsunami of emotions by the quiet sea where I spent my summer. There was grief, there was doubt, but there was also a calling to lift my head and look toward a horizon; to see through despair and find a way forward.

I had to remind myself: I am no stranger to such undertakings. My memoir, I Can Imagine It for Us, envisions a home and a homeland I have never been to. It is born of the belief that political imagination is a free space that no one can occupy, where alternative futures can still take root. It can challenge dominant realities, transform the abstract into a lived experience, and evoke empathy across borders. 

I credit the seven books on this list with showing me a way through the darkness—confirming that, as a writer, I possess no tool more powerful than the ability to envision how things can be otherwise. Like I Can Imagine It for Us, the works on this list return through narration to ravaged homes and stolen homelands, in Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, and Palestine. They return to assert presence through stories that refuse to be overlooked.

Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury

My father rarely spoke to me about his life in Palestine; it was too painful a subject—but this seminal novel did what he never could. It reoriented me toward my roots and revealed how ownership can be recovered through a story. In Gate of the Sun, Khoury moves from town to town, detailing life before and after the Nakba of 1948. He names streets and people and recounts battles fought for love and for land. I remember sitting quietly in bed, reading it, when I reached the battle for al-Kabri, my village in Acre, and saw my grandfather’s name on the page. On page 166, I read, “If we fought throughout Palestine the way al-Kabri fought, we would not have lost the country.” I learned that my grandfather was an influential political leader, and that the entire village was stationed around his home, which, in many ways, served as Acre’s command post. I remember my head buzzing with a profound sense of discovery. I made a pact with myself that night to never stop writing toward a free Palestine, until it comes to be. 

The Return by Hisham Matar

Jaballa Matar, a prominent Libyan diplomat-turned-dissident after the rise of the Qaddafi regime, was Hisham Matar’s father. In 1979, the family fled persecution and relocated to Cairo. In 1990, Jaballa was abducted by the Egyptian secret police and handed over to the Libyan authorities. He was imprisoned in Abu Salim prison, and following a mass killing there, the family never heard from him again. The Return traces Hisham Matar’s journey back to Libya in search of answers about his father’s fate. Like I Can Imagine It for Us, it is a story of fathers, fatherlands, and returns. It mirrors my own desire to register presence, even in absence, and to seek recognition, if not on the ground, then through the literary imaginary. I would also say that his vulnerability, and the grace with which he reveals it, gave me permission to get personal and to recognize the value in doing so.

No One Knows Their Blood Type by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat

This exquisite novel was longlisted for the 2025 Palestine Book Awards and, in my view, deserved to win. Abu Al-Hayyat’s narrative centers on Jumana, a woman struggling with the recent death of her father. After his passing, she discovers that her blood type does not match his, which casts doubt on her biological connection to him and, by extension, to her Palestinian heritage. The father, once a freedom fighter, is a deeply flawed character, much like mine. He is no perfect victim, and neither are the other characters. But it is precisely this complexity that brings them to life in dazzling, unforgettable ways. Hazem Jamjoum puts it beautifully in his translator’s afterword, noting that, unlike much of the literature that emerges from communities marked by dehumanization, this is not a story that pleads for the humanity of its characters. It does not appeal to a colonial gaze; instead, it centers us, our voices, our freedom to tell our own stories, and our authorship over our own narratives.

House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

This memoir caught me off guard. I began reading it at Beirut airport and was in tears within the first few pages. Leaving Beirut is always emotionally charged for me. It’s my family’s adopted home following their exile from Palestine, the city of my father’s youth, and where my aunt, the last surviving member of our Nakba generation, still lives, though she now has dementia. In this elegantly written memoir, Shadid returns to his ancestral home in Southern Lebanon, once a splendid Ottoman structure, now destroyed by Israeli bombardment, to rebuild it. The act of rebuilding becomes a meditation on memory, ancestry, migration to America, and the destruction wrought by occupation and war. In my memoir, I too rebuild my ancestral home, word by word, as a way to meditate on loss and return. Like Matar, Shadid showed me how a sentence can carry grief, and still land in grace. 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Minor Detail showed me how to hold witness. How to be uncomfortable in my witnessing and still not be able to look the other way. I read this painful account of a Palestinian girl being raped and murdered by Israeli soldiers in a natural reserve in Oman, of all places. I skipped the hike through mountains to read it in a single sitting, heart racing through every page. The novel recounts a real story within a fictional framework. Years later, an imagined woman from Ramallah becomes haunted by this “minor detail” in history and journeys across the occupied territory to confront the forgotten site of the crime. Through this fictional treatment of a real event, Shibli both records and reclaims the story. Her narrative demands that you keep looking, even if, in looking, you are imagining.

Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani was foundational in harnessing literature as a political tool. He transformed Palestinian realities, whether under occupation or in the diaspora, into stories that emphasize the transformative power of narration. Men in the Sun explores the harrowing dangers of forced mobility. It tells the story of three Palestinian refugees who die while hiding in a water tanker as they attempt to cross secretly from Basra to Kuwait. By the end, the reader is left with a haunting question: Why didn’t the men knock on the walls of the water tank? Their silence becomes a stark metaphor for voicelessness born of fear, and a missed opportunity for rescue, but also, a wake-up call to the reader who bears witness, yet does nothing to help.

I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti

I Saw Ramallah is a cornerstone of Palestinian literature. On a personal level, it moves between my motherland, Cairo, and my fatherland, Palestine, tracing an emotional journey through a vanishing landscape. The book recounts Mourid Barghouti’s return to Palestine after decades of exile following the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel occupied the West Bank. It is only after the 1993 Oslo Accords that he comes back. There is much to admire in this memoir: its lyrical prose, its intimate voice, and its powerful humanization of the Palestinian experience. Yet what strikes me most is its title. It is deceptively simple—to see, despite erasure, is itself an act of defiance, agency, and authorship.