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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Written by: Nathan Thrall
Narrated by: Peter Ganim
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About this listen

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times.

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.

©2023 Nathan Thrall (P)2023 Macmillan Audio
Middle East Politics & Government Emotionally Gripping Israeli-Palestinian conflict New York
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What the critics say

"Nathan Thrall’s book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions.”—Arundhati Roy, Booker Prizewinning author of My Seditious Heart

“It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall’s evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heartbreaking.”—Adam Hochschild, National Book Award finalist and author of American Midnight

“This brilliant and heartbreaking book is a masterpiece. It reads like a novel, yet is all sadly true. I finished it in tears."—James Rebanks, New York Times bestselling author of Pastoral Song

What listeners say about A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

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Unflinching honesty

Nathan Thrall’s book provides a synopsis of the plight of the Palestinians. Living in Jerusalem and as a Jew himself reporting on the injustices committed against the Palestinian people gives more credence.

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The mostly unknown life of West Bank Palestinians.

Using a tragic event, the author accurately depicts the constricting daily life of Palestinians who live in the West Bank.He shines a light on what most Jews who live in the diaspora have no conception of what passes for a “normal” life for West Bank Palestinians.

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So touching

This is so well done , your heart will pain for these beautiful people , such resilience under so much oppression

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