Born in the Burj Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon, Olfat Mahmoud grew up inside the long aftermath of the Nakba, carrying an inherited attachment to Tarshiha, the Palestinian town from which her family had been displaced.

The memoir covers childhood in the camps through the Lebanese Civil War, through to Palestinian political organising and nursing with the Palestinian Red Crescent, then eventually academia. Large political events — the Cairo Agreement, the rise of the PLO in the camps, Israeli military campaigns, Sabra and Shatila — are experienced through houses, family photographs, nursing wards, neighbourhoods and people repeatedly rebuilding lives inside conditions they did not choose. Mahmoud’s account is not simple recollection but instead a swing at the idea that exile eventually exhausts political memory. Tarshiha survives because people continue to remember it, narrate it and orient themselves towards it. 

Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear only; internally clean and unmarked. Very good to near fine condition.