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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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Set in Mandatory Palestine during the 1936 Arab Revolt against the British colonial authorities, The Lord is the story of Tareq, a young man from Jaffa who is capable, or so it seems, of performing Christ-like miracles. It is also the story of Miss Alice Rhodes, an English missionary who teaches Tareq as a boy, and who recounts Tareq's life to a journalist in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Considered an unremarkable student by his teachers, Tareq is nevertheless something of a magician. After leaving school, he travels and performs across the country, and soon rumors fly of his incredible feats, from walking through walls to averting storms of locusts to curing olives trees barren of fruit.

Tareq’s performances become increasingly defiant of the British administration as he urges his fellow Palestinians to rise up against their oppressors. This draws the attention of the British chief of intelligence, Challis, who will stop at nothing to crush Tareq and the resistance he stands for. 

With The Lord, Soraya Antonius recreates the extraordinary richness and vivacity of Palestinian life before the Nakba, painting a portrait of Palestinian society at once panoramic and intimate. A clear-eyed examination of a chapter of British colonial history that laid the groundwork for the conflicts that continue to rack the Middle East, The Lord remains as timely and poignant now as ever.

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781681379579
Pages: 240
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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