An Old Carriage with Curtains
GHASSAN ZAQTAN, TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL WILDER
The concluding novel in a trilogy that has become a landmark of Palestinian fiction.
An Old Carriage with Curtains is the third and final book in a masterful trilogy of novels encompassing the history of the people of the Palestinian village of Zakariyya. The novels trace the wandering trajectories and inner lives of characters connected to this village across decades, as well as the vicissitudes of historical change and displacement in the land. Through the return of a middle-aged man to the site of an ancient monastery in the hills near Jericho that he once visited as a boy, the incredibly vivid and surprising stories of Hind, a stage actress and brilliant storyteller, the stories of torturous routes of checkpoints and bureaucratic blockages, and decades of Occupation, Zaqtan creates a narrative of personal reckoning and reflection.
The vectors of memory and historical reflection interweave in this dreamlike narrative, which delivers a singularly powerful depiction of subjective and collective experience in the face of devastating and sweeping historical change.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born near Bethlehem, Palestinian poet, novelist and editor GHASSAN ZAQTAN has lived in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Tunisia. His verse collection Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, translated by Fady Joudah, was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for 2013, and he was nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in both 2014 and 2016. His name appeared for the first time in 2013 among the favourites to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
SAMUEL WILDER is a translator of Arabic literature, a writer, and a student of comparative poetics. Since 2006, he has lived and worked as a literary translator in Cairo and Beirut, and pursued academic work in London and Cambridge.
INFORMATION
Published by Seagull Books, 2024
ISBN 9781803092348
156 pages, hardback