Brilliant ... Elias Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages
- Edward Said,
He creates his very own, and very believable, newly coined mythologies...[the] result is a work of remarkable suspense... poetic and mysterious
- Nicholas Blincoe, Daily Telegraph
<i>Gate of the Sun</i> is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork
New York Times Book Review
The word 'brilliant' is etched across Khoury's new novel... It's a novel that will outlive us
Independent
In <i>Gate of the Sun</i>, a character dreams of writing a 'book without a beginning or end... an epic of the Palestinian people'... Khoury's monumental novel is in a sense that groundbreaking book
Guardian
An ambitious and powerful novel... Epic
Times Literary Supplement
Moving, funny and often savage
- Tariq Ali,
This is a challenging novel that demands from us an imagination potent enough to link its many loose threads...Humphrey Davies's translation is masterful, allowing us to appreciate <i>Gate of the Sun's</i> short, clear sentences and crisp metaphors afresh - Samir El-Youssef, <i>New Statesman</i>
Elias Khoury spreads before us a colourful tapestry of life and death, woven with love and compassion - Claudine Besset-Lamoine, <i>Monde Diplomatique</i>
In a makeshift hospital in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an aging Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son Dr Khaleel - who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness.
In an attempt to revive his patient, Khaleel, begins telling Yunis the stories of their people's exile in Lebanon. He evokes deserted peasant villages, the suffering caused by the Lebanese civil war and the refugees' hopes to return home with a subtle mixture of anger and compassion. Khaleel also narrates Yunis' own extraordinary life.
Interweaving many true-life tales collected throughout Lebanon and its refugee camps over the course of seven years, Elias Khoury has created a monumental and spellbinding saga.