The Illusion of Return Samir el-Youssef Halban, 154pp, £12.99
Seventeen years after fleeing Lebanon, a man waits at Heathrow for Ali, his one-time friend.
Both men, Palestinians born in Lebanon, left in the mid-1980s when fighting between Lebanese, Palestinian, Israeli and Syrian militias threw the country into near-anarchy. Since then, the narrator has had virtually no contact with anyone from his former life. Absorbed in academia in London, he laughs at the thuggish Palestinian "Right to Return" campaigners who collar him in the student union bar.
However, Ali's visit brings back painful memories. As the fragments of the narrator’s past begin to emerge, we learn the stories of others who lived on the margins of society in Lebanon: a young man forced to become an Israeli collaborator; a young woman driven to suicide by her bullying older brother; a young man murdered for being homosexual. Their histories are a telling counter-narrative to the Right to Return rhetoric of a united struggle for Palestinian freedom.
As Ali suggests: "The idea of return is actually an attempt to escape the inhospitality of the present state of the world." Samir el-Youssef’s book is a nuanced, thought-provoking look at this world, free of easy, political answers.
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