A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Written by Nathan Thrall

A father races against time and borders to find his son after a tragic bus crash near Jerusalem.

4.3/5 Goodreads · 14,056 ratings

272 pages

$29.99Save 5%

In stock. Also at Amazon or Bookshop.

Bookroo's summary

Abed's world shatters when his son's school bus crashes near Jerusalem. As he navigates a labyrinth of checkpoints and bureaucracy, his desperate search for Milad intertwines with the lives of others caught in the conflict. Amidst chaos and heartache, Abed faces the harsh realities of being Palestinian, confronting barriers both physical and emotional. Will he find his son, or will the tangled histories of those around him alter his path forever? This gripping tale reveals the human struggle within one of the world's most contested regions.

From the publisher

WINNER OF THE 2024 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times. Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos–the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge. In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall–hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)–offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

At a glance