Ruqayya was only thirteen when the Nakba came to her village in Palestine in 1948. The massacre in Tantoura drove her from her home and from everything she had ever known. She had not left her village before, but she would never return. Now an old woman, Ruqayya looks back on a long life in exile, one that has taken her to Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf, and given her children and grandchildren. Through her depth of experience and her indomitable spirit, we live her love of her land, her family, and her people, and we feel the repeated pain of loss and of diaspora.
Author Biography
Radwa Ashour (1946-2014) was a highly acclaimed Egyptian writer and scholar. She was the author of more than fifteen works of fiction, memoir, and criticism, including Granada (AUC Press, 2008) and Specters (AUC Press, 2010), and was a recipient of the Constantine Cavafy Prize for Literature and the prestigious Owais Prize for Fiction.
Kay Heikkinen is a translator and academic who holds a PhD from Harvard University and is currently Ibn Rushd Lecturer of Arabic at the University of Chicago. Among other books, she translated Naguib Mahfouz's In the Time of Love (AUC Press, 2010).
