A narrative fabric where voices, narrative units, and levels of existence intertwine. Points of view intersect and narrators multiply, just as the characters and their narrative dialects vary, resemble, and contradict each other. This forms a network of relationships that reveals a skillful, delicate, and knowledgeable awareness in crafting a novel, resulting in an artwork that is both thrilling and astonishing.

It is particularly thrilling in its flowing, tense, and bold language, which depicts scenes of sexual desire and the violence of physical conquest. It is also thrilling in shaping the narrative event and developing it from the ordinary and familiar to the fiercely shocking. And it is astonishing in the path it lures the reader into, portraying a world of disappointments and the suffering of the oppressed, concluding in the final pages with something approaching the supernatural, making it impossible for the reader to even glimpse any hints that might foreshadow it.

A cleverly woven novel, it goes beyond sketching the details, minutiae, and chatter that usually crowd a novel, to focus, almost exclusively, on what might be called 'climactic moments' and significant glimpses sharply extracted from the characters' lives. This masterful choice condenses fifty years into events, emotions, and desires formed at the crucial moments of human life and the critical junctures of Arab reality.

Among its most brilliant features is the use of the multiple narrators technique to truly reveal the multiplicity of perspectives and the impossibility of accepting any narrator's account as 'the truth'. It smoothly and quietly transitions from third-person to first-person narration, from singular to plural—an ancient technique in Arab culture, particularly prominent in the Quranic text, which some mistakenly attribute to an influence from writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

In conclusion: this novel is teeming with characters who are almost larger than life, characters crushed by life, and characters who violate all values and norms to achieve their goals. There are also characters who submit without question or awareness to inherited customs and values. All this revolves in a vague space of secret operations, prisons, fedayeen struggle, and the conflicts fought by the resistance, with all its nobility and baseness, loyalty and opportunism. It ends with the rise of religious currents and the catastrophes of bombings carried out by the same hands that profited and then paid a heavy price for the seeds they had sown.

— Kamal Abu Deeb

• Author: Jihad Abu Hishish
• Publisher: Fadaat Publishing House
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Number of Pages: 170