BOOKS IN BRIEF

in the original Italian in 2006, winning the prestigious Italian Bagutta Prize in 2007. The novels and short stories take as their subject the Italian experience in Cyrenaica. The Young Maronite (1971) discusses the 1911 war prompted by Giolitti, Omar’s Wedding (1973) narrates the ensuing truce and the attempt by the two peoples to strike a compromise before the rise of Fascism, while The Nocturnal Visitor (1979) chronicles the end of the twenty-year Libyan resistance. Banipal’s website has a page on how translator André Naffis-Sahely unravelled the story of Alessandro Spina and set about translating it. Go to: http://www.banipal.co.uk/book_reviews/113/the-whole-shadow-of-man--alessandro-spinas-libyan-epic/. The Confines of the Shadow, Volume I, translated from the Italian by Andre Naffis-Sahely, Darf Publishers, UK, 2015. ISBN: 9781850772781, 371pp, Pbk, £9.99/$10.79 M Obank

Susan Abulhawa’s novel The Blue between Sky and Water, follows four generations of the Baraka Palestinian family who were forced to leave their village Beit Daras during the Nakba. Settling down in a refugee camp in Gaza, the family lives the decades through various joys and hardships, all the way to the Hamas electoral victory in 2006. Nur, a psychologist from North America, comes to live in Gaza and find her roots, and shocks the family by suddenly revealing that she is their granddaughter. This is a rich saga of memories mingled with family life, snippets of historical news items, and tales of family members lost and missed, mostly told through the voice of the unborn and later deceased Khaled, who gives hints of what is to come, and an anonymous narrator who holds on to the story’s chronology. Written in English. Bloomsbury Circus, London, June 2015. ISBN: 9781408865101, 293pp, Hbk, £16.99/$26.00. Aurora Tellenbach

Bitter Almonds by Lilas Taha is a bitter-sweet novel about a Palestinian orphan, Omar, who grows up in a refugee camp in Syria. The

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