In Search of Fatima

Reviews / Votes

Ghada Karmi's stunning memoir is remarkable. Extraordinarily well-written, it is the amazingly honest story of a Palestinian woman of exceptional self-awareness. Hers is a story of exile and displacement ... rich in detail and human experience. Karmi is excellent on the quality of family and even communal life in Mandatory Palestine ... she also has a wonderfully subtle way of showing how in thousands of different ways the political and the personal intermesh, and this she does with a skill and insight that could be a novelist's envy. -- Edward W. Said One of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement, which western power and its creature, Israel, have normalised. * New Statesman * Ghada Karmi writes simply and poignantly. Here is a story of our time, exile and dispossession, and how she has come to be neither British nor quite Arab. * Jewish Chronicle * A very timely book in the current political situation ... This should serve to remind people just what the big fuss in the Middle East is all about. -- Ahdaf Soueif * Times Literary Supplement * ... an engrossing and remarkably frank account ... * MultiCultural Review * This is an important memoir, beautifully written by an intelligent, sensitive woman ... It should help those of us who do not understand why growing numbers of Muslims and not a few Christians have lost faith with Western pretensions of fairness. * Financial Times * Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch. * Economist * Karmi's great achievement is to humanise the Palestinian predicament. Violent uprooting and exile have permanent psychological effects, which, as the Jewish people discovered, are not necessarily assuaged by the passage of time. We need counter-narratives like this, because we have recently learnt that it is not only parochial but also dangerous to ignore the pain and rights of others. * Independent *