'A thrilling defiant novel' FATIMA BHUTTO 'A masterpiece' MARC LAMONT HILL 'Wonderful ...
Shines a ray of hope into some very dark places' MICHAEL PALIN 'A fearless work of imagination'
AHDAF SOUEIF Winner of the Palestine Book Award Nahr has been confined to the Cube: nine square
metres of glossy grey cinderblock devoid of time its patterns of light and dark nothing to do
with day and night. Journalists visit her but get nowhere because Nahr is not going to share
her story with them. The world outside calls Nahr a terrorist and a whore some might call her
a revolutionary or a hero. But the truth is Nahr has always been many things and had many
names. She was a girl who learned early and painfully that when you are a second class
citizen love is a kind of desperation she learned above all else to survive. She was a girl
who went to Palestine in the wrong shoes and without looking for it found what she had always
lacked in the basement of a battered beauty parlour: purpose politics friends. She found a
dark-eyed man called Bilal who taught her to resist who tried to save her when it was already
too late. Nahr sits in the Cube and tells her story to Bilal. Bilal who isn't there Bilal
who may not even be alive but who is her only reason to get out.
