Every new book is a gamble. Unless you’ve read it before, you don’t really know what you’re getting. Sure, there are some ways to mitigate risk. Tried and tested author; recommendation from a friend or book blogger who shares your taste; perhaps a bookseller or book club you’ve found you jibe with. But even the best of these can end in disappointment. Not every book can be a gem.

So it’s an extra big risk to pre-order a not-yet-published book by an unknown author based solely on a random Bookstagram post. What can I say? They were persuasive: a way to financially support Palestinian authors and encourage more publishers to work with them is to pre-order their books. Demonstrate there is a demand. So I pre-ordered Behind You is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj, mostly forgot about it and then a couple of months later got a lovely surprise in the post.

I actually don’t mind the risk of not loving a book. Makes it easier to decide which ones to keep after reading, which ones to even finish. But in this case I did love the book. And that’s despite some narrative decisions that haven’t always worked for me in the past.

This novel is about three Palestinian families in Baltimore, Maryland. Each chapter concentrates on a different character from these families, following them closely for days, weeks or even months. There are big time jumps between each chapter as well, so that by the end of the book decades have passed. Some chapters only have a small cast, others feature dozens of people – a lot of whom will have appeared in previous chapters or go on to appear again later.

These are almost closer to linked short stories than one contiguous story. But without the mental gear switch required when the entire cast and setting and subject matter changes every 10–30 pages. The structure allows Muaddi Darraj to really underline what her characters do and don’t have in common.

“How warm her hands had felt rubbing his back, holding the beads on his rosary for him when he’d collapsed into sobs. They were not smooth hands, but supple like broken, warm leather. They’d lifted his mother by the arms, these hands, held a stethoscope to her chest, and then her back…In the end, in a final act of grace, these strong hands had pulled the sheet over his mother’s contorted, twisted face.”

For most of the chapters, the lead characters are American citizens born to Palestinian immigrant parents or grandparents. A couple of chapters follow the older immigrant generation. They’re all Christians – though multiple characters are assumed by other people to be Muslim. They all speak Arabic – though some have a deeper connection to the language than others. Beside this, these are very different people living very different lives.

Which I think is the point. One of the families is significantly richer than the others. The characters vary in education levels. Their jobs include police officer, real estate mogul, shopkeeper, house cleaner, lawyer. They have very different things going on in their lives, or sometimes the same thing with very different reactions. There are three pregnancies of unmarried teen girls, with three different outcomes.

It sounds like a lot, maybe even a mess, but it isn’t. I think it works as a coherent whole because the writing is engaging, often funny. Every character becomes real in just a line or two so by the time they reach their emotional denouement, it’s like you’ve known them for hundreds of pages rather than a dozen at most.

A truly great read that has stayed with me in the week since I finished it.

Published 2024 by Swift Press.

Source: The Feminist Bookshop