In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story
Ghada Karmi’s acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, flight to Britain after the catastrophe, and coming of age in Golders Green, the north London Jewish suburb. A powerful biographical story, In Search of Fatima reflects the author’s personal experiences of displacement and loss against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped conflict in the Middle East. Speaking for the millions of displaced people worldwide who have lived suspended between their old and new countries, fitting into neither, this is an intimate, nuanced exploration of the subtler privations of psychological displacement and loss of identity.
Reviews
“This is an important memoir, beautifully written by an intelligent, sensitive woman ... It should help those of us who do not understand why growing numbers of Muslims and not a few Christians have lost faith with Western pretensions of fairness.” — Financial Times
"Ghada Karmi’s stunning memoir is remarkable. Extraordinarily well-written, it is the amazingly honest story of a Palestinian woman of exceptional self-awareness. Hers is a story of exile and displacement ... rich in detail and human experience. Karmi is excellent on the quality of family and even communal life in Mandatory Palestine ... she also has a wonderfully subtle way of showing how in thousands of different ways the political and the personal intermesh, and this she does with a skill and insight that could be a novelist’s envy." — Edward Said
“Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch.” — Economist
“Karmi’s great achievement is to humanise the Palestinian predicament. Violent uprooting and exile have permanent psychological effects, which, as the Jewish people discovered, are not necessarily assuaged by the passage of time. We need counter-narratives like this, because we have recently learnt that it is not only parochial but also dangerous to ignore the pain and rights of others.” — Independent
“A very timely book in the current political situation ... This should serve to remind people just what the big fuss in the Middle East is all about.” — Ahdaf Soueif, Times Literary Supplement
“Ghada Karmi writes simply and poignantly. Here is a story of our time, exile and dispossession.” — Jewish Chronicle
“One of the finest, most eloquent and painfully honest memoirs of the Palestinian exile and displacement, which western power and its creature, Israel, have normalised.” — New Statesman
Ghada Karmi was born in Jerusalem and trained as a doctor of medicine at Bristol University. She established the first British-Palestinian medical charity in 1972 and was an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs. Her previous books include The Ethnic Health Factfile and Jerusalem Today: What Future for the Peace Process? and, as co-editor with E. Cotran, The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1998.
