Gate of the Sun

Description

From many true-life tales collected throughout Lebanon and its refugee camps over the course of seven years, Elias Khoury has created a monumental and spellbinding saga, putting human faces to a political tragedy at the forefront of the news even today. In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son Dr Khaleel --- who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. In an attempt to revive his patient, Khaleel, begins telling Yunis the stories of their people's exile in Lebanon. He evokes deserted peasant villages, the suffering caused by the Lebanese civil war and the refugees' hopes to return home with a subtle mixture of anger and compassion. Khaleel also narrates Yunis' own extraordinary life. Interweaving many true-life tales collected throughout Lebanon and its refugee camps over the course of seven years, Elias Khoury has created a monumental and spellbinding saga.

Elias Khoury was born in Lebanon in 1948. Editor in Chief of the cultural pages of the daily newspaper Al-Nahar and professor of Arabic literature at New York University, he is the author of eleven novels. In 2000 he was awarded the Prize of Palestine for Gate of the Sun. Elias Khoury is regarded as one of the best Arabic writers of his generation.

Brilliant ... Elias Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages -- Edward Said He creates his very own, and very believable, newly coined mythologies...[the] result is a work of remarkable suspense... poetic and mysterious -- Nicholas Blincoe * Daily Telegraph * Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork * New York Times Book Review * The word 'brilliant' is etched across Khoury's new novel... It's a novel that will outlive us * Independent * In Gate of the Sun, a character dreams of writing a 'book without a beginning or end... an epic of the Palestinian people'... Khoury's monumental novel is in a sense that groundbreaking book * Guardian *