Against the Loveless World
Nahr writes from a solitary Israeli cell she calls 'the Cube,' setting down the story of how she got there. Born to Palestinian refugees in 1970s Kuwait, she dreamed of an ordinary life — until a brief, failed marriage, a family sliding toward poverty, and a predatory older woman push her into a hidden life of escort work for Kuwait's powerful men.
When the Gulf War scatters her already displaced family to Jordan, Nahr travels to Palestine to formalise a divorce — and unexpectedly falls in love: with the land, and with Bilal, her former husband's brother. Drawn into the daily indignities of occupation and the clandestine work of resistance, she becomes a different woman than the one she set out to be.
Winner of the Palestine Book Award, Susan Abulhawa's Against the Loveless World is a fierce, sensual, and unflinching novel of exile, survival, and defiance. Told in a bold, unapologetic voice, it follows one woman's transformation from survivor to revolutionary.
A defiant Palestinian woman who narrates her life from an Israeli isolation cell.
Her former husband's brother, a resistance figure she comes to love.
An older woman who draws Nahr into escort work in Kuwait.