Mornings in Jenin

By Susan Abulhawa. This is a desperately sad book, one of the saddest I've ever read. It concerns the conflict between Palestine and Israel which of course hasn't ended yet, and there are few signs that it will ever end. It brings a completely different aspect to some events which were news during my childhood and later. It begins before she is born, but is told mostly through the eyes of a Palestinian girl born in 1955, the same year as me. I don't know how it ends, but I'm sure it won't be a question of living happily ever after. I'm reading it for my literature class which is due to start in a couple of weeks' time and is the first for this term of books by Middle Eastern authors. I just hope some of them won't be so sad.