Praise
Absurd and original. Star of the Sea is more proof that to read Elias Khoury is to conjure alongside a genius.
— Zain Khalid
Khoury skillfully evokes the cruel absurdities of Israeli occupation as Adam attempts to cope with past and present anguish.
— Leslie Williams, Booklist
I have the feeling that when the concluding volume of Children of the Ghetto appears in English, we’ll have in our hands one of the most indelible epics in 21st-century literature, a Palestinian story no reader will be able to forget.
— Jess Row, The New York Times Book Review
Khoury has long been focused on the aftereffects of the Nakba, most notably in Gate of the Sun (2006), emphasizing the cruelty of forced expulsion and the confusions of statelessness . . . Adam recalls his intense, hopeful, and difficult relationships with women . . . [adding] lyrical and deeper elements . . . A powerful chronicle of the search for peace and identity amid constant disruption.
— Kirkus Reviews
Nothing prepared me for how extraordinary Elias Khoury's Children of the Ghetto, Star of the Sea would be. Nothing could or can. When reading it, I woke up at night looking for his characters, seeking the beings encountered in this lyrical hauntology that unseats time.
— Alina Stefanescu
For all his narrative twisting and disavowals, Khoury gives us a vivid glimpse of the unspeakable. Several texts haunt this extraordinary book — those of Ghassan Kanafani, S. Yizhar, Khoury himself — but I was particularly struck by references to Mahmoud Darwish’s “Memory for Forgetfulness,” about the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. For Darwish, recollection both expels the emotions of painful memory, and secures the past against historical forgetting.
I love the universe Khoury built from existing worlds . . . I am looking forward to the final volume of Children of the Ghetto not because there will be any additional plot points or revelations but rather because the existing installments have given me an irrational amount of pleasure, upon rereading, the long spirals of Khoury’s voice telling me things it seems like I’d never heard before or simply didn’t believe until they were said over and over.
— Sasha Frere-Jones, 4Columns
Like Khoury's masterpiece Gate of the Sun (1998), Star of the Sea shows how the history and experience of the 1948 Palestinian Catastrophe (the Nakba) can be most powerfully conveyed through fiction. His brilliance, compassion and sharp humour lives on inside it.
— Karma Nabulsi, History Today
This is a story of one man’s relationship to his own identity and his desire to live without any history or nostalgia. Even if it means living a lie . . . Star of the Sea is building on a much wider story with a fresh angle on questions about what it means to write about one’s own life
— Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts
Humphrey Davies’s extraordinary, lyrical translation of Elias Khoury’s The Children of the Ghetto: Star of the Sea took my breath away . . . Khoury leverages narrativity itself to reveal the voices disinherited from their history by the Nakba. Rather than 'tell' the story, he shows us how the story has 'been told,' in fragments and broken shards, in shame and terror, in hope and desperation. Each story opens into other tales, voices, and places . . . A literary masterpiece that defies our excuses for refusing to care about Palestinian lives.
