Palestinian Studies

Book Talk | Nathan Thrall | A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Thrall Poster

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

True North Classroom (101), Stephen Robert Hall, Watson Institute

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Pulitzer Prize-Winning author Nathan Thrall will discuss his book “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”

About the Book

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for the school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer in a horrific accident. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem.

Book Events

Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge: a kindergarten teacher and a mechanic who rescue children from the burning bus; an Israeli army commander and a Palestinian official who confront the aftermath at the scene of the crash; a settler paramedic; ultra-Orthodox emergency service workers; and two mothers who each hope to claim one severely injured boy.

Immersive and gripping, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine that offers a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.

About the Author

Nathan Thrall received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama” (Metropolitan Books, 2023). The book was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, Time, The Economist and fifteen other publications. Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection “The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine” (Metropolitan Books, 2017). His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, London Review of Books, and The New York Review of Books and been translated into more than twenty languages.

Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. 

Thrall is the former director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, where from 2010 until 2020 he covered Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s relations with its neighbors.