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 tortuous 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.

A highly anticipated edition of Zaqtan’s work from 2014 to 2020, all in English for the first time.

Ghassan Zaqtan is not only one of the most significant Palestinian poets at work today, but one of the most important poets writing in Arabic. Since the publication of his first collection in 1980, Zaqtan’s presence as a poet has evolved with the same branching and cumulative complexity as his poems—an invisible system of roots insistently pushing through the impacted soil of political and national narratives.

Strangers in Light Coats is the third collection of Zaqtan’s poetry to appear in English. It brings together poems written between 2014 and 2020 drawn from six volumes of poetry. Catching and holding the smallest particles of observation and experience in their gravity, the poems sprout and grow as though compelled, a trance of process in which fable, myth, and elegy take form only to fall apart and reconfigure, each line picked apart by the next and brought into the new body.
 

A haunting, lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and homeland, with the poems threading together the personal and the collective in a Palestine shaped by conflict and beauty.

The Town I Never Told You About gathers poems written by celebrated Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan between 2022 and 2024, at a time of intensifying conflict ravaging his homeland. Emerging from both memory and imagination, these poems trace the contours of hillscapes and villages, mapping a Palestine that is both historical and mythic, personal and collective. In Zaqtan’s hands, language threads its way through time—winding across landscapes marked by war, displacement, and enduring beauty. Each poem feels like part of a longer thread: a moment lifted from an ongoing inner epic, stitched into being with dreamlike clarity and haunting precision.

Long meditative pieces drift through shadow and sunlight, while other poems strike with the sharpness of remembered incident. This is poetry as pilgrimage—quiet, persistent, and full of echoes. A book that doesn’t so much end as continue resonating long after the last page is turned.