A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall
A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall
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A Day in the Life of Abed Salama
Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

Author: Nathan Thrall

Narrator: Peter Ganim

Unabridged: 6 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/03/2023


Synopsis

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.

About Nathan Thrall

Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. He is also the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books and been translated into more than two dozen languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College. He lives in Jerusalem.


Reviews

Goodreads review by ancientreader on October 24, 2023

I requested this ARC after seeing Masha Gessen's interview with Nathan Thrall. In their introductory paragraph, Gessen speaks of the "intractable narratives" of Israel/Palestine; Thrall can't make those narratives any more tractable but he does illuminate them. I believed, until I read this book, th......more

Goodreads review by Michał on March 04, 2025

Ja pierdole.......more

Goodreads review by Megan on December 19, 2023

Quite short in length, but incredibly powerful in its telling. I feel A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a bit of a misnomer, as not only do the different chapters cover different time periods and phrases of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but there are a lot more individual characters (and persp......more

Goodreads review by Nada on May 29, 2024

a devastating story. fuck occupation. freepalestine. -------------------------- “There was no suggestion that Israel’s fund for accident victims should compensate the families of green ID holders, whose children were killed on a road controlled by Israel and patrolled by its police. No one argued that......more

Goodreads review by Stitching on December 28, 2023

It's a great book if you like books that thoroughly resist the temptation to idealize the victims and make them into saints. The only thing that I really struggled with is that we got a fair bit about a lot of the people involved and being terrible with names there's probably a couple people whose s......more


Quotes

"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

"In this luminous story of Palestinians striving to live under Israeli rule, there is much cruelty. But there is also great love—of parents for their children, of lovers for their beloved, and of people for their home. This book is transformative."
—André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me By Your Name


Awards

  • Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year
  • Time Magazine Best Books of the Year
  • New Yorker Best Books of the Year
  • Pulitzer Prize - Winner