A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

Name: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
Author: Nathan Thrall
ISBN: 9781250854988

Nathan Thrall

award won

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Nathan Thrall

award won

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#262 of 3,809 books · #15 in Politics & Current Affairs

Won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (2024). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

A Day in the Life of Abed Salama won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times. 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 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.

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