A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: A Palestine Story
Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, Nathan Thrall's book arrives bearing serious literary credentials. They are, it turns out, entirely deserved. At its heart is a single, shattering day. Five-year-old Milad is boarding a school bus for a trip to a theme park near Jerusalem. It's the kind of ordinary childhood excitement that should be forgettable. Instead, a terrible accident sets everything in motion. Milad's father, Abed, races to the wreckage only to find his son already gone, whisked away to an unknown location. What follows is a father's desperate search through a labyrinth of physical checkpoints, emotional torment, and bureaucratic walls that exist, with crushing specificity, because Abed is Palestinian. Thrall weaves Abed's anguished journey together with the stories of others drawn into the same catastrophe. A kindergarten teacher and a mechanic pull children from the burning wreckage. An Israeli military commander and a Palestinian official reckon with the scene's aftermath. A settler paramedic, ultra-Orthodox rescue workers, and two mothers, each convinced a gravely injured child is her own, all orbit the same wound. Jewish and Palestinian histories, grudges, and loves press against one another in ways that feel both accidental and completely inevitable. The Observer called it a book that 'speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history', and that gets close to the feeling of reading it. Thrall writes with the patience and precision of a documentarian, but the pull of a novelist. The result is a portrait of life in Israel and the West Bank that is specific where polemic is vague, and human where statistics are cold. Quietly devastating.
- Author: Nathan Thrall
- Publisher: Penguin
- Genre: Journalism & Media Studies
- ISBN: 978-1802060041
- Pages: 272 pages