Hussein Barghouthi

A dreamlike novel from Palestine that traces a restless soul’s journey through landscapes of memory, longing, alienation, and exile. In this profound and evocative novel, acclaimed Palestinian author Hussein Barghouthi invites readers on an extraordinary, youthful journey through a landscape of memory, longing, alienation, and exile. Translated with great sensitivity by his son, Áthar Barghouthi, this deeply personal narrative unfurls as a stream-of-consciousness odyssey, blurring the lines between reality and dream. Haunted by a pervasive sense of loss, the prose, rich with poetic imagery, explores themes of displacement, identity, and the enduring shadows of a contested homeland. The Third Bank of the Jordan River is a powerful, meditative work that defies conventional boundaries. With unflinching honesty, Barghouthi confronts the political through deeply human stories, capturing the restless search for meaning and the enduring human hunger for connection and freedom.

The Blue Light is an autobiographical novel in chapters and vignettes that travels through memory, time, and language. Hussein Bargouthi tells his story with Bari, a Turkish American Sufi, during Bargouthi’s years as a graduate student at the University of Washington in the late 1980s. The Blue Light has several beginnings and many returns—from Beirut’s traumatic sea to musings on color and identity, from Buddhist paths to Rajneesh disciples, from military rule to colonial insanity, from drug addiction to sacred rock. Written and lived between Arabic and English, this is a unique book whose depth is as clear as its surface. It will tempt you to dismiss it as it compels you to devour it for illumination. Merging memoir with fiction, and the hallowed with the profane, The Blue Light is a meditation on and liberation from madness—a brilliant, inimitable literary achievement.

A poetically written and bitterly sweet memoir about nature, death, life in Palestine, and the universal concept of home. Palestinian writer Hussein Barghouthi was in his late forties when he was diagnosed with lymphoma. He had feared it was HIV, so when the cancer diagnosis was confirmed, he left the hospital feeling a bitter joy because his wife and son would be spared. The bittersweetness of this reaction characterizes the alternating moods of narration and reflection that distinguish this meditative memoir, Among the Almond Trees. Barghouthi’s way of dealing with finality is to return to memories of childhood in the village of his birth in central Palestine, where the house in which he grew up is surrounded by almond and fig orchards. He takes many healing walks in the moonlit shadows of the trees, where he observes curious foxes, dancing gazelles, a badger with an unearthly cry, a weasel, and a wild boar with its young—a return not only to the house but to nature itself. The author decides to build a house where he would live with his wife and son, in whom he sees a renewal of life. The realization of his impending death also urges him to vocalize this experience, and he relates the progress of the disease at infrequent intervals. And, ultimately, he details the imaginative possibility of a return to life—to the earth, where he would be buried among the almond trees.