Gate of the Sun

By: Elias Khoury

Narrated by: Rami Medina

Length: 20 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

Gate of the Sun: Bab al-Shams is the first true magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. Through the passing of the beloved midwife and matriarch of the Shatila refugee camp outside Beirut, the listener enters a world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. A doctor tells a story to a man in a coma in an attempt to keep him alive. The patient, Yunes, is from Galilee, where he left Nahla, the love of his life. The novel unfolds at his bedside through Dr. Khalil’s intimate and haunting flights of memory.

Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian/Israeli struggle for us, shedding light on the turbulent history with love and empathy. Khoury opens up a whole new territory, envisioning a place where confronting pain and humiliation might lead, if not to reconciliation, then at last to finding an element of the other in one’s self. “Us” and “Them” become inextricably entwined through this realigned 1001 Nights. Originally published in Beirut in 1998, the novel has been a sensation throughout the Arab world, in Israel, and throughout Europe.

©2006 by Archipelago Books. English translation © 2006 by Humphrey Davie (P)2022 by Blackstone Publishing

Deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature

This is the best novel I have read in my life. It was just as good the second time through. And the narration is simply extraordinary.

Listening to it will give you an intimate feel for the Palestinian experience as it has evolved over time. But it is filled with wisdom and insight into the human experience itself.

Truly extraordinary.