October Book recommendation

Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is a gifted poet and a charming individual (I know because I met her in Jerusalem a few years back, where she impressed with her openness and her kindness). I highly, highly recommend her poetry collection, translated by Fady Joudah, You Can Be The Last Leaf. Al-Hayyat has also just published a novel (which draws on her own autobiography), No One Knows Their Blood Type (once again Al-Hayyat has a fantastic translator, Hazem Jamjoum). It is the book I’ve read in the last month that I could not put down — that I barely took notes in, because I was too busy experiencing it to think about it, analyse it. It opens with a woman discovering that she does not have the same blood type as her father, and therefore that the man she thought was her father most likely is not. Also that she may not be Palestinian, although being Palestinian has defined her whole life. Her father was a fighter and a mid-ranking member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He was also a violent, blind, domineering man. The books tells the story of how the narrator and her sister grew up — and it is a dramatic and at times tragic story, spanning Beirut, Amman, Tunis and Jerusalem. Al-Hayyat’s writing is electric, she is a such a writer that she overflows with things to say and original ways of saying them. Everywhere she turns her eye — to the distant past of her childhood or to her present surroundings — she picks up something memorable. And the tone is, as is always the case with Al-Hayyat, light and insightful and tender beyond what you could possibly expect in telling a story that is often traumatic and heartbreaking.