The Man Who Read Books

De: Rachid Benzine, Sam Taylor - translator

One morning, during a ceasefire in Gaza, a young photographer wanders far from his hotel and into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across an old man, surrounded by stacks of books. As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller asks him to listen to his story first. ‘For isn’t there a story behind every gaze? The story of a life. Sometimes of an entire nation.’

The story that unfolds encompasses exile and imprisonment, resistance and political disillusionment, the joy of watching your children grow up and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. They say that when an old man dies a library burns. Day after day, the photographer returns. Year after year, Nabil shares the books that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive these events – from the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti to Gabriel García Márquez, Frantz Fanon and Ernest Hemingway.

The Man Who Read Books is a magnificent modern story of the power of words against barbarism, of books as bastions of resistance against the loss of empathy, of literature as a means of sustenance during our darkest hours.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"An essential novel to remind us that those in Gaza continue to read, they continue to exist" (DAVID DIOP, International Booker Prize-winning author of AT NIGHT ALL BLOOD IS BLACK and BEYOND THE DOOR OF NO RETURN)

"One of the most powerful novels of the literary season. It is not only a story about Palestine, it’s a plea for humanity"

"A novel that burns with relevance"

"A veritable literary phenomenon"