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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