Against the Loveless World
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
Reviewed by Jess
📕📒📕📒
Linda has been telling us for years about the power of Susan Abulhawa’s words and I’m sad to say I’ve only just got round to reading one of her novels. Don’t sleep on them like I did; a novel of this magnitude deserves to be read and shared across the world.
Nahr’s story of exile and pain is told by flipping between her current status of imprisonment and her life memoirs as she writes them with the one pencil she’s allowed to have. What we follow is a life of resistance, family, strength and fight to live a simple life of freedom and to find the feeling of home. Nahr is one of the strongest female protagonists I’ve ever read, enduring so much but still hoping and yearning for better.
I learnt so much about the geopolitical climate in the Middle East from the 80s to the 00s, which may have only taken up small bylines in our broadsheets but were and still are true life for the people of Palestine. Continuous displacement and persecution on levels we learn nothing about, muddied waters on who the real villains of the stories are, and so much more than this. This is one of the stories where you can’t sit and trust in the happy moments, something sinister lurks around every corner.
I give this 4/5 only because it’s a difficult read that I read too quickly. I’ll definitely be going back and taking my time with this and picking up more of Abulhawa’s novels too. No doubt she is one of the most important voices in modern literature today.
