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The Lord

The Lord

by Soraya Antonius, introduction by Selma Dabbagh

$17.95
$17.95
Available as E-Book Fiction International Literature
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The February 2026 selection of the NYRB Classics Book Club

A reporter posted to Lebanon in the early 1980s, covering the Israeli invasion of the time, encounters Miss Alice, an English missionary who is nearing the end of a long life in the region. With memories that go back to World War I and the start of the British Mandate in Palestine, she unfolds the strangely puzzling story of one of her students, Tareq, a talented and charismatic youth who, on leaving school, took up the unlikely calling of a traveling magician. Moving from village to village, from country to city, Tareq observes the growing discontent with the colonial authorities that will erupt in a full-scale rebellion in 1936. He observes; perhaps he contributes. Among the people, he has come to be known as "the lord," while his comings and goings have also attracted the attention of Challis, the ruthless British police chief. A manhunt begins.

The Lord re-creates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, offering a view, at once panoramic and intimate, of Palestinian society and colonial occupation. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and telling now as ever.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379579
Pages: 248
Publication Date:

Praise

An admirable elegant and restrained first novel.
—The Times Literary Supplement

Soraya Antonius’s fine first novel . . . is remarkable chiefly for its superb evocation of the texture of everyday life in the villages. The Lord is a passionately nostalgic tribute to a way of life that has been destroyed.
—The Observer

Soraya Antonius has an excellent ear for the gulf that separate two cultures, the rulers and the ruled. But the greatest delight of her book is her vivid evocation of great cities like Jerusalem and Jaffa, glories of a vanished Palestine, tragically doomed amid its olive groves.
—The Standard

Bitterly powerful.
—New Statesman

Antonius is a splendid writer. . . . [The Lord is] a sensitive and evocative novel.
—Cosmopolitan

Through detailed descriptions of smells, colours, tastes and noises of the impoverished Arab villages, mixed with the noise of the clinking cocktail glasses of the British civil servants in Jerusalem, the writer conjures up a picture of Mandatory Palestine . . . [a] fascinating novel.
—The Jewish Chronicle

Passionate, intimately informed . . . the book triumphantly evokes its time and place, and depicts with searing accuracy the tragic collision of age-old custom with modern bureaucracy.
—Publishers Weekly

A most remarkable, original, and compelling book.
—Sybille Bedford

A moving and heartfelt account of one of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century.
—John Julius Norwich

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