Nominated for the Skroutz Book Awards 2025 audience awards.
On a winter morning in 2012, just outside Jerusalem, Abed Salama, a Palestinian from the West Bank, learns of a car accident involving a bus carrying children. He rushes to the scene of the accident, fearing that his five-year-old son is on the bus. The accident itself could perhaps have happened anywhere. What followed, could not.
By recording the personal stories of the dozens involved—Palestinians and Israelis, victims, relatives, people who helped or did not help—Nathan Thrall, with a clinical eye, highlights the political dimension of the tragedy, the power, spatial, and institutional structures that define the lives of people in the West Bank, behind the raised wall. (From the presentation on the back cover of the book)
“I know of no other text about Israel and Palestine that reaches this level of insight and understanding... It can also be read as an introduction to modern Palestinian history.” (The New York Review of Books)
“Brings the reader as close to reality as words can.” (Times Literary Supplement)
“Meticulously documented... painfully direct.” (Haaretz)
“Thrall captures both the universality and the particularity of the experience of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.” (The Economist)
“A quietly sweeping chronicle.” (Financial Times)
