A book shaped by absence: absence of rain, absence of home, absence of certainty.

Land of No Rain is a hybrid work — part novel, part poetic essay, part existential travelogue — by Jordanian writer Amjad Nasser. Written in spare, precise prose, the book follows a wandering narrator across desert landscapes, refugee camps, and fractured geographies of the Middle East.

Here, absence becomes a way of seeing, and the dry terrain becomes a register of loss, memory, political erasure, and the everyday endurance of people caught between nationhood and displacement.

Land of No Rain is a debut that registered immediately as something unusual, when poets dip into longer works and prose, often you get a book that feels both poetic and philosophical, rigorous and receptive to hard, quiet truths about landscape, belonging, and what it means to inhabit a world without balm.

A quiet, serious book for readers interested in modern Arabic poetry and prose.