Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa is a historical fiction work about trauma (trigger warning). It is a tense, emotional and absorbing read. The story is narrated by a Palestine woman, Nahr, from solitary confinement. She has spent years in a small cement prison cell as a political prisoner. After a sympathetic guard provides her with pencils and a notebook Nahr begins to fill the pages with an account of her life.

I colonized the colonizer’s space of authority. I made myself free in chains and held that courtroom captive to my freedom.

Nahr and her family had been displaced many times. From Kuwait, her country of birth, Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine, her ancestral homeland. Nahr was subject to an arranged marriage at a young age to a Palestinian man who subsequently abandoned her. She was then tricked and blackmailed into becoming a sex worker by a women called Um Buraq. The exploitation gave her financial independence, but she also lost faith in love and men.

This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere.

Eventually Nahr traveled to Palestine to seek a divorce. Through her husbands brother she got involved with a group of young resistance fighters. This is how she ended up being locked in the concrete cube accused of being a terrorist. 

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Against the Loveless World is much more than a story about personal trauma and the violence of conflict and war. It is a novel about politics, displacement, the desire for belonging, gender, survival and love. A very powerful read.