“I could not believe that human beings could forget so easily. . . .” Love and life, sex and death, childhood and oppression are Inside the Night. Vivid moments of remembrance, disparate yet interconnected, come together to form the body— torn but not broken—of this novel. Beginning with a scene of departure, the two nameless narrators roam back and forth in time, veering from childhood mischief to a Palestinian refugee camp massacre; from ardent first love to necessary migration to an Arab oil country for employment; from spirited adolescent fantasies to the grim reality of life in an Arab country whose claims to progress are mounted on the bent backs of its people. A forest of interwoven tales and strange destinies, Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel carves the history of a people over half a century into fragments that are poetic, multi-sensory, and richly evocative. Inside the Night’s self-contained freedom is a refreshing development in the corpus of Palestinian, and human, literature.

Ibrahim Nasrallah was born to Palestinian parents in Jordan in 1954, and grew up in a refugee camp there. After working as a teacher and a journalist, in 1996 he became vice-president of Darat al-Funun, Jordan’s most prominent art and cultural center. He has written fifteen collections of poetry and eleven novels as well as works of literary criticism. He is also a painter and photographer. Bakr R. Abbas (1929–2000) was the supervisor of the translation department of Aramco for more than thirty years, and translated a number of books into Arabic.