A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

By: Nathan Thrall

Narrated by: Peter Ganim

Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Long-listed, Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year 2023

Long-listed, Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, 2023

Long-listed, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023

Immersive and gripping, an intimate story of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels a tangle of lives, loves, enmities, and histories over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall—hailed for his “severe allergy to conventional wisdom” (Time)—offers an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.

©2023 Nathan Thrall (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Nathan Thrall’s book made me walk a lot. I found myself pacing around between chapters, paragraphs and sometimes even sentences just in order to be able to absorb the brutality, the pathos, the steely tenderness, and the sheer spectacle of the cunning and complex ways in which a state can hammer down a people and yet earn the applause and adulation of the civilized world for its actions.”—Arundhati Roy, Booker Prizewinning author of My Seditious Heart

“It is hard to think of another book that gives such a poignant, deeply human face to the ongoing tragedy of Palestine. Thrall’s evocation of both a terrible crisis and the daily humiliations of life under occupation is nothing short of heartbreaking.”—Adam Hochschild, National Book Award finalist and author of American Midnight

“This brilliant and heartbreaking book is a masterpiece. It reads like a novel, yet is all sadly true. I finished it in tears."—James Rebanks, New York Times bestselling author of Pastoral Song

One story of an accident that encapsulates so much of the trauma of daily life due to the Palestinian Israeli conflict

Amazingly written. Well researched. One of the best readings and pronunciations non-English names and places. Excellent.

Sad but fascinating story. Very well written and performed.

nothing it was a great retelling of true events. Very tragic story for all the families involved.

Our Ignorance Revealed At Last!

Western media tell us virtually nothing about Palestinian lives. Awareness comes first - only then can we restore justice for Palestinians. Thank you Nathan Thrall for writing a terrific book that should be read by everyone on our planet!!!

Heart and gut wrenching!

It shatters my heart to read the immense human suffering in the present climate. I have no words to describe the pain I am feeling as this tragedy is multiplied by thousands.

Touching and revealing

Amazing blend of intimate personal detail in a context of a complex political and cultural conflict in Israel/Palestine.

Eyeopening Perspective

Interesting perspective addressing real issues that Palestinians confront. Extremely sad tale of the effects of a horrible school bus accident.

A MUST READ FOR EVERYONE

This book taught me a lot about the history of Israel and Palestine in a most humanizing way. It's heartbreaking to hear the human costs of oppression. It's humanity - should not be framed simply as hatred of one religious group vs another. it makes you wonder why we can't discuss the questions raised at the end of the book about the underlying causes of the laws in effect legalizing and mandating the oppression of the palestinians as people.

Captivating

A beautiful, personal, heart-wrenching explanation of the daily humiliation of Palestinians living under Israeli rule. Anyone who needs a condensed history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict should listen. I learned a lot.

Brutal yet Eye-Opening

I will start off by saying that this is hands down one of the hardest recent books to finish, not because it is poorly written, but because the sheer emotional gravity of the situation itself and the surrounding circumstances that led up to it are so heavy. This book is exceptionally well written and uses one tragic incident in order to shed light on decades and decades of Israeli imperialism and the apartheid system which expands by the minute. Even today, Israel blew up a Palestinian University. The tragedy continues. It is heartbreaking and we should all be upset that our tax dollars are helping fund this oppression. Thrall was wise to focus on an incident involving innocent children so as to cut away all the political BS.

Lastly, the structure of the book was very well laid out. not sure if I can even describe it very well, but the author seems to zoom in on every new character that is encountered, to give you their backstory and relevance. Like the rings of a tree, or concentric nested circles, is the way that I would describe it. It can come off as a bit ADHD, but it is executed so fluidly that I think it's brilliant. The way Thrall zooms in and out of the situation is masterful.

Heartbreaking

Retelling the story from different perspectives was very moving. The daily hardships are hard, but in a crisis devastating.