April 1948, Jerusalem: It is the fifth month of what will become a nineteen-month conflict. Seven hundred thousand Palestinians flee their homes. Eight-year-old Ghada Karmi wakes to a shattering crash. Two suitcases are packed in a hurry. Loved ones (a nanny, Fatima, and the family dog, Rex) are left behind. Following a brief exile in Syria, the family settles in London. There, Karmi becomes a doctor and a staunch activist for the Palestinian right of return. She described those events in her first memoir, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story (Verso, 2002). This sequel narrates her own eventual return,
There is a particular form of low-lying corruption that you learn to live with if you belong to certain kinds of cities. They are sprawling, chaotic, overpopulated places whose residents claim what space they can around tentacles of unplanned roads and a pandemonium of traffic. Their various nuclei are government buildings that comprise long corridors and annexes that are navigated like a maze; systems that take you back and forth from one point to another, one counter to the next, one officer to another, who may or may not sign your paper before telling you to go elsewhere. He gives
