In the outside world, Nahr is branded a terrorist and a prostitute; to others, she is a revolutionary or a heroine. But the truth is that Nahr has always been many things at once—combining multiple faces and living her life under different names.
She was a girl who understood too early and too painfully that when you’re treated as a second-class person, love can easily turn into a desperate attempt to stay afloat; above all, she learned how to survive.
She was a young woman who arrived in Palestine in the wrong shoes and with no great expectations—and yet found what she had always been missing, in the basement of an old hairdresser’s shop: meaning, politics, and friends.
"This truly riveting novel of love, passion, and politics is at once a story of personal and revolutionary awakening. Susan Abulhawa creates a tense narrative about Nahr and her life—from a young girl to an independent woman—interweaving it with the wider context of Palestinian exile and resistance." — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the novel “The Sympathizer”