Sara M. Saleh's debut novel is a multigenerational family story that moves between Palestine, Egypt and Australia, tracing how displacement really builds. 

The novel lingers on its afterlife: the ways grief, love, faith and family expectation echo across generations, reshaping lives long after the original break has passed. Coffee brewed before dawn, the names of paint colours in a family business, songs remembered from childhood, fragments of Arabic carried into English—these become the material through which memory survives. The novel is deeply attentive to domestic life, understanding kitchens, workshops and gardens as places where history is quietly preserved when official narratives fail. Politics is present throughout, but it emerges through intimate relationships rather than abstract argument.

Published by Melbourne's Affirm Press in 2023, Songs for the Dead and the Living quickly established Saleh as a truly distinctive voice in contemporary Australian literature. It will particularly appeal to readers of family sagas, diasporic fiction and novels interested in the relationship between inheritance, identity and belonging.

2023 Affirm Press paperback. Very good condition with light shelf wear.