In her striking debut novel Ever Land, Amy Abdelnoor steps into the polarized landscape of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exploring its fractures through a supernatural interweaving of the lives of two teenage girls separated by three decades. In this way, Abdelnoor cleverly bypasses political rhetoric and high melodrama to create a raw, balanced narrative about the overarching human cost of displacement and denial, memory and inherited trauma.
The novel is structured as a dual-narrative moving between the contemporary reality of life on an Israeli settlement and the vast limbo of the Islamic barzakh; the intermediate, metaphysical realm where the soul stays between earthly death and the final Hereafter.
Abdelnoor drops a subtle trail of historical breadcrumbs rather than explicit dates to anchor her timelines. Attentive readers can orient themselves through real-world markers early on, such as a reference to Egyptian President Nasser, or mentioning the riots sparked by Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the Al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem in 2000.
Dinah’s Disorientation
For eighteen-year-old Dinah, the move from London to a gated Israeli settlement is a claustrophobic exile. Grieving the recent loss of her father, Dinah views her family’s life as a fractured triangle. She, her mother Ruth and younger brother Benj are forcibly ‘yoked’ to her mother’s new partner, Lavi.
Abdelnoor brilliantly captures the friction of Dinah’s new environment. To her, the soulless settlement is a place of ‘sterile cleanliness’ that lacks the comforting, noisy chaotic colour and freedom of London. She feels trapped by her mother’s hyper-vigilant concern for her safety and Lavi’s rigid rules about where she can go and which gates of the Old City she must avoid.
Sent into Jerusalem to learn Hebrew, Dinah is introduced to a world dominated by the looming reality of obligatory military service. Hanging out with her American friend Mimi, and her new boyfriend Eban, she is unprepared for the intensity of all that she must learn over and beyond just the language. Eban dismisses the settlements as ‘glorified look-out towers’ while eagerly anticipating being moved to a tank unit in the shtakhim, the Territories. When he describes his military training in Gaza, and shooting rubber bullets into the air, Dinah feels a visceral, debilitating panic. Although she is aroused by Eban and they have an intense physical relationship, she is increasingly repelled by him emotionally.
Seeking answers for herself, she tries to peer into the forbidden territory, joining a group of women volunteers who monitor and document the harsh realities of what happens at military checkpoints.
Safa’s Unfinished Business
Running parallel with Dinah’s teenage alienation is the voice of Safa, a fourteen-year-old Palestinian who died three decades earlier during the Six-Day War. Safa’s village was razed, her family killed and her own body desecrated; burned in a mass pile without prayers, the mourning or rituals of an imam to guide her passage to the Hereafter.
Because of this violent rupture, Safa is ‘shackled to the In-Between’. Her refusal to cross over completely isn’t just about the lack of a proper burial; it is bound to the fate of her younger sister, Nur, who survived the war but went missing amongst refugees.
From her vantage point in the barzakh, Safa watches the new houses built with modern, rolling shutters over the ruins of old stone houses surrounded by prickly pears, amidst an uprooted landscape she once knew of olive trees and orange groves. ‘The sound of children crying threads its way through the street where it is joined by other sounds that had not reached us before, as if whole villages have been thrown into an enormous sack to be lifted and shaken by an unknown giant hand.’
When Dinah’s family arrives and settles in, Safa spots a special receptivity in the grieving, disturbed teenager from London. Unable to locate her sister alone in the physical world, Safa begins to reach across the spiritual divide, flooding Dinah’s sleep with fragments of strange, urgent dreams and sudden flashbacks of awareness in the daytime.
‘In the Never-Time and the All-Time of the In-Between, I am able to hold both girls in my vision. I see Nur, rationing the last finger of tepid water that must do for her and her mother as they wait to pass through the checkpoint. And I see Dinah in the bar, her tongue passing over liquorice-tasting lips.’
Nuance in the Grey Zones
Abdelnoor handles the difficult subject matter with remarkable balance, as the experiences of these two young women illustrate how the situation is far from being black-and-white.
There is a strong contrast between the sterile, secure privilege of a newly arrived Jewish immigrant family and the historic, heavy stone-walled memories of a displaced Palestinian family whose home was turned into a ‘not-village’.
And we see how deeply the past contaminates and destroys the present. The young are ‘fed milk and politics and pain’, illuminating how historical terror ricochets down the decades, shaping the fears and battle-scarred defensiveness of both sides.
Through Dinah’s outsider eyes and Safa’s historical memory, the daily mechanics of control in the shape of the checkpoints, ID checks and rules and the indifference of the indoctrinated young soldiers, are laid bare without moralising.
By the middle of the novel, Abdelnoor has beautifully wound the tension into a tight spring: the reader is balancing on the edge of an angst-inducing metaphysical knife. As Dinah stands at a chaotic checkpoint with a group of volunteer women, the boundaries between the living world and the barzakh begin to blur.
‘Hanna reminded Dinah that their focus was observation. “That’s our strength. Watching the checkpoints and documenting what we see. We’ll go to one checkpoint and separate into pairs, to monitor as much as we can. You’ll come with me today. Usually there are more of us, so our groups are larger, but today this will have to do.” She paused. “It’s going to feel strange; you won’t have seen anything like it before, I don’t think. None of us expected it before we came for the first time. And that’s why what we’re doing is so important”.’
Dinah tells no one about the strange dreams haunting her, or that she feels she has been to this checkpoint before. She recognizes a face in the crowd: a young man with smiling eyes and a distinct dark mark across his cheek. Who is he?
Can an eighteen-year-old girl from London, struggling with grief and a disruptive sense of unbelonging, successfully act as a proxy for a spirit to find a child who disappeared thirty years ago?
As Eban’s military deployment intensifies and Safa’s spiritual grip tightens, will Dinah break under the pressure of two conflicting worlds competing for her attention?
Ever Land is a beautifully written luminous, poetic exploration of grief, both past and present, that cannot be pushed away and buried. The conflict has become a permanent, unyielding fixture, calcified to the point that there are no political or diplomatic answers to be had. The power of Ever Land lies in the fact that it is a profound, empathic look at the deeply personal, human costs of being caught in the crossfire. To discover whether Safa finds her peace and where Dinah’s search for belonging leads, you will just have to buy a copy of the book and find out for yourself!
Buying books using the ‘BUY’ links helps support independent bookshops and our work as a CIC.
The copyright to all the content of this site is held by the individual authors and creators. All rights reserved. Enquiries: please use the contact form.
Be the first to comment