Verses of Forgiveness: A Novel

Verses of Forgiveness, the story of a Palestinian suicide bomber awaiting his hour of death, opens with the proclamation, "I am a terrorist, a dreamer."
While Ahmed prepares an attack on the heart of Israel, the mother he never knew finds him languishing in a brothel. She reveals that his father was a Jew who survived the Holocaust and fled to the Promised Land. There he joined the Zionist terrorist group, Irgun. At the moment of the conception of the state of Israel, Ahmed's Jewish father and Christian mother consummated their love.
Ahmed tells his father's story and we revisit with him day by day, smell by smell, through the early stages of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the fundamental absurdity of a war built on ashes and political mistakes. Through her use of poetic language, Myriam Antaki makes beauty the ambassador of unnecessary violence and hatred.