JEDDAH: Amy Abdelnoor’s debut novel “Ever Land” arrives after a seven-year “gestation period,” but its emotional foundation stretches back nearly three decades.
Set in the early 2000s, it follows two youngsters: Dinah, a British-Jewish teenager who moves with her family into a brand-new house that was built on the ruins of a Palestinian village, and Safa, a Palestinian girl who was killed decades ago in the Six Day War, stuck in the afterlife from where she searches for her little sister Nur, their family’s only survivor.
The novel will be published by Penguin UK Books’ imprint Hutchinson Heinemann on July 9, 2026.
“(The book) has been in my heart since I lived in Palestine and in Lebanon,” Abdelnoor told Arab News.
The novel will be published by Penguin UK Books’ imprint Hutchinson Heinemann on July 9, 2026. (Supplied)
In 1998 at age 20 — midway through an English and Arabic degree at Cambridge — she spent a summer volunteering with a UK charity in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.
“It was incumbent on you to come back to the UK and talk about your experiences and share the truth of the Palestinian story,” she noted. “Palestine has always been part of my vocabulary and my discourse.”
The experience also shaped her understanding of her own Lebanese heritage, passed down by her Lebanese-Christian grandfather, who came to the UK in 1940.
In 2000, she moved to Ramallah and experienced life under Israeli military occupation during the early years of the Second Intifada. She recalled feeling vulnerable as Israeli tanks stood outside her apartment, and later when she was strip-searched while leaving Ben Gurion Airport to return home.
“I hesitate to use the word traumatized because I think about Palestinians now and how much worse it has become,” she said. “I was then experiencing what it was to be catapulted into living under occupation … that sense of injustice burned in me for years.”
Nearly two decades later, when she committed to writing the draft that would become “Ever Land,” Abdelnoor, older and wiser as a teacher and mother of three, returned to the diaries, emails and books that marked that earlier period in her life.
As part of the research process for the story, she visited Palestine and the Occupied Territories in Israel in August 2023 and witnessed a region “on edge.”
During her trip, she went looking for the destroyed village of a close friend who was 14 when her parents were killed in front of her by Israeli soldiers during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, where they were refugees.
Abdelnoor identified the village by its sabar, or cactus plants, still growing wild over the rubble decades after its inhabitants had been forcefully displaced.
“I just stood there and thought, the land speaks. The land won’t be silenced,” she recalled. “I had this idea that the cactus plant was like this portal between the two worlds: between Israel welding itself onto Palestine and Palestine speaking.”
She found another unlikely spark of inspiration in a newspaper column about a council in America that demolished a beloved 100-year-old house, having confused it with one three streets away.
“A house demolished in America, by mistake. A Palestinian house in the West Bank, demolished on purpose,” she recalled thinking. As these two seemingly unrelated images collided, the narrative architecture of “Ever Land” took shape in her mind.
The author is unambiguous that the novel “had to be about Palestine.”
“I had a lot of tension in me, particularly when I was editing … about the idea of Dinah’s narrative being the propulsive one and not wanting to lose Safa’s story.”
Abdelnoor’s creative choice to tell a story about Palestine partly through a “discombobulated and ironically unsettled” Jewish teenager can be traced back to an email she received when she was writing home from Ramallah about checkpoints and demolitions more than 20 years ago.
A British university friend had written back: “There are two sides to every story, Amy, and you’re getting very caught up in one of them.”
“There are two sides to every story, and they’re wholly unequal,” she recalled writing back. “If I could just bring you here for a day, you’d get it.”
With the vocabulary of silencing and the “denial of Palestinian truth” intensifying in the last three years, Dinah is an invitation for empathy made into a character.
The young girl from North London “who could be the girl next door, or a friend” beckons the reader toward more unfamiliar territories that challenge prejudices.
Through a cast of characters who cross paths with Dinah, Abdelnoor depicts the daily indignities faced by Palestinians and their resilience against occupation.
As Dinah — initially unaware that she is a “settler” — begins to comprehend the oppression of Palestinians, hopefully so will the readers who “still don’t get it.”
“The novel puts you in this geography that you understand before it takes you to a geography that you don’t know," the author explained. “In a way it’s unbelievable we even have to say we need to value everyone’s lives.”
Abdelnoor signed with her agent in June 2023, believing she was writing for those interested in “niche literary fiction.” Just four months later, Israel’s military campaign in Gaza fundamentally changed the context into which the novel would be published.
“My creative development, and the possibility that my book might reach more readers, is happening alongside a genocide. And that’s horrible and abhorrent,” she said.
She added that many artists and creatives are experiencing this dissonance but it is “wholly subordinate to the pain of Palestinians.”
For the debut author, and perhaps other artists, musicians, and filmmakers working in solidarity with Palestine, it is clear that art alone cannot put a stop to the injustice, but it is a powerful form of resistance against the erasure of a people.
“We’re all different instruments in an orchestra and we need all instruments for the whole picture,” Abdelnoor said. “We need different voices adding to this resistance song.”
