قناع بلون السماء

Nur is a young Palestinian from a refugee camp near Ramallah — an archaeology graduate, fluent in Hebrew, and, to strangers, easily mistaken for an Israeli. When he finds a blue Israeli ID card in the pocket of a second-hand coat, he begins, almost as an experiment, to wear it like a mask, slipping across the lines that usually confine him to join an archaeological dig near Megiddo and move through an Israeli world normally closed to him.

The longer Nur inhabits his invented alter ego, "Ur," the wider the rift within him grows, complicated further by two women he comes to love. Framed partly as a novel Nur is trying to write about Mary Magdalene, the book becomes a meditation on identity as performance and on the blurred, painful line between the self and the enemy other.

Winner of the 2024 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Basem Khandaqji's A Mask, the Color of the Sky is a searching, layered novel about occupation, belonging, and the cost of borrowing another life.