Khalifeh's novels — Wild Thorns (1976), The Sunflower (1980), Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman (1986), The Inheritance (1997) — are the central body of West Bank fiction in Arabic. Wild Thorns, in particular, is a foundational text of the Palestinian novel: a returnee discovers, on coming back from the Gulf, that the ordinary Palestinian workers around him are now commuting daily into Israel for low-paid construction work, complicating the politics of resistance for everyone.
Recurring themes
the West Bank under occupation
Palestinian women and the family
the worker who crosses the green line
class inside the Palestinian story
Selected works
- 1976Wild Thorns
- 1980The Sunflower
- 1986Memoirs of an Unrealistic Woman
- 1997The Inheritance
- 2009Of Noble Origins
- 2014Origin and Branch