Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury
In a Beirut hospital, stories are told to a comatose fighter — an epic retelling of the Palestinian exodus from Galilee to the camps.
In a makeshift hospital in Beirut’s Shatila camp, Khalil keeps vigil over Yunes, a legendary fighter of the 1948 war who lies in a coma. To keep him alive, Khalil tells stories — of the Galilee, of the flight of 1948, of Yunes’s secret crossings back into Palestine to meet his wife in a cave called Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun. Through this narration the novel becomes a collective epic: the memory of the Nakba gathered from its scattered survivors, fragment by fragment.
Published in Arabic in 1998, fifty years after the expulsion it chronicles, Gate of the Sun was acclaimed across the Arab world and in Humphrey Davies’s English translation as one of the great novels of the Palestinian experience — a book without beginning or end, as Khoury’s own characters imagine it.
About the author
Elias Khoury (1948–2024) was a Lebanese novelist, critic, and editor, long a champion of the Palestinian cause. He edited the cultural pages of An-Nahar and Al-Mulhaq, taught at New York University, and wrote novels including Little Mountain and Yalo.
Details
- Published in Arabic as Bab al-Shams, 1998
- English translation by Humphrey Davies, Archipelago Books, 2005
The edition
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Connected in the archive
29 connected records29 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
on a related subject — 29 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Minor Detail
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "novel", "nakba", "memory".
- Mornings in Jenin
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "novel", "nakba".
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Acreعكا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Apeirogon
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "novel".
- and 23 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Gate of the Sun.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/gate-of-the-sun/.- MLA
“Gate of the Sun.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/gate-of-the-sun/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-gate-of-the-sun, title = {Gate of the Sun}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/gate-of-the-sun/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }