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.

We Must Look Deeper into this Struggle

I was halfway through this rich, compelling story before realizing it was not a novel. I cried. As another American Jew who does not see critical appraisal of Israeli/Palestinian history and circumstances as "antisemitism," this book is an inspired, though tragic, depiction of a deeply complex problem that military vengeance will never solve.

A MUST

I am grateful to the author and all the conscientious Jews that let their voices heard.
This was an eye opener to the systematic destruction that occupation and apartheid do to those societies . I hate occupation and apartheid thousand times more than before reading this book.
I didn’t finish reading the book , I reached when Huda was dealing with her teenager’s court. I then crashed, started to cry loud and got serious chest pain.
If you ever want to understand “ the conflict” this book is a must.

Testimonial for the Occupation

A documentary of an East Jerusalem tragedy, giving us a window into Palestinian every day lives in the West Bank. A generation's travel from the mid 1980s, through 2 Intifadas, and on to 2010.