A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (Hardcover) | A Special Offer for Supporters of Adalah Justice Project

For a limited time only, preorder your copy of A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and 25% of your purchase will go to support Adalah Justice Project!

“Riveting...an eye-opening and empathetic analysis of a profoundly personal tragedy.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Captivating…a heart-wrenching portrait of an unequal society.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Thrall’s taut, journalistic account of Abed Salama’s daylong search to discover what has become of his son is an agonizing, infuriating, heartbreaking indictment of Israel’s occupation. …An unforgettable and devastating symphony of pain and outrage and a demand for responsibility.”
—Booklist (starred review)

Orders are expected to arrive within 4-12 business days. 

Immersive and gripping, an intimate true story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing 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. 

Praise for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama:

“Nathan Thrall’s book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs, and sometimes even sentences just in order to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions.”
—Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize–winning author of My Seditious Heart

“This brilliant and heartbreaking book is a masterpiece. It reads like a novel, yet is all sadly true. I finished it in tears.”
—James Rebanks, New York Times bestselling author of Pastoral Song

“In this luminous story of Palestinians striving to live under Israeli rule, there is much cruelty. But there is also great love—of parents for their children, of lovers for their beloved, and of people for their home. This book is transformative.”
—André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Call Me By Your Name

“It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall’s evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heartbreaking.”
—Adam Hochschild, National Book Award finalist and author of American Midnight

“A brilliant and heart-wrenching book that captures the daily tragedy of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation better than any other I have read. An outstanding achievement and a must read.”
—Eugene Rogan, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Fall of the Ottomans

“This impressive book brings the reader through a detailed set of human histories, relationships and experiences, all stemming out from one horrible incident and one Palestinian family affected by it. It shows us how everything in these Palestinians’ daily lives—from the mundane to the catastrophic—has been controlled, contained and shaped under Israeli rule. Amid their struggle to survive, Nathan Thrall documents the best and worst of humanity: pride, bravery, love, stupidity, callousness and cruelty.”
—Sally Hayden, Orwell Prize-winning author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned

“In excavating the site of a single tragedy, Nathan Thrall uncovers the sprawling architecture of oppression that dominates Palestinian lives. His writing propels the reader across a geography that is partitioned behind walls and into enclaves, revealing in visceral, human detail what Israeli subjugation means, and how it shapes the most
intimate corners of the Palestinian experience. With empathy and grace, Thrall transforms this incomprehensible, avoidable loss into an ode to a father’s love.”
—Tareq Baconi, author of Hamas Contained

“A towering achievement. I've not read anything like it. Thrall takes the bureaucracy and infrastructure of apartheid and uses them to tell a painfully emotional, personal story.”
—Omar Robert Hamilton, author of The City Always Wins