Author: Sahar Khalifeh

Nationality: Palestine

Original title: باب الساحة

Genre: Fiction

Year original first published: 1994

Translation language: English

Translation title: Passage to the Plaza

Translator(s): Sawad Hussain

Nationality: UK

Publisher: Seagull Books

Publication year: 2020

Is this a re-translation: No

Prizes awarded: prizes_awarded

Awarding body: awarding_body

Awarding / Funding country: awarding_funding_country

Physical description: Fiction (Novel)

Cover designer: cover_designer

Cover illustrator: cover_illustrator

ISBN: 9780857427700

Notes: Part of 'The Arab List' series.

About: In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha's abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women's lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife. In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity--both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large--will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.

Acknowledgment: acknowledgment

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