Told in the first person, Asma Al Atawna’s debut coming of age novel captures with beautiful and surprising honesty the life of an eponym young woman.

By Isabella Hammad, for The New York Times, June 22, 2019
Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto — although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university colleagues to make that assumption. He means the “ghetto” of the Palestinian town of Lydda, created by Jewish forces who uprooted tens of thousands of Palestinians on a death march in one of the bloodiest massacres of the 1948 Nakba. (That …

In Stella Maris, Adam has decided to write his story, that of the “New Adam”, which, he would like to believe, starts when he runs away from home at 15, to go as far as possible from his childhood in the ghetto of Lydda (My name is Adam, Children of the ghetto 1), and from his mother Manal. The New Adam is in a painful quest of a restful identity: “I want to become a Jew”, he says. “This is impossible” he is told. 

Interview by Tom Zoellner, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Published February 18th, 2019
ELIAS KHOURY MIGHT BE the Lebanese version of what James Michener is to the United States, or Carlos Fuentes is to Mexico— a big-hitting novelist who aims not merely for the human heart but also for the soul of a nation. His latest book, My Name Is Adam, is the first volume of a projected trilogy about the nakba — the Arabic term for the forced removal of Palestinians from the newborn state of Israel in 1948. The protagonist …

A review by Avraham Burg, for the Haaretz, May 2018
It’s very hard to review something so close to perfection. About all one can do after such an engrossing read is describe, quote, compare and reflect. Elias Khoury’s remarkable literary skill and the brilliant Hebrew translation of Yehouda Shenhav-Sharabani (a work of art in itself) make “Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam” one of the most poignant and important novels of recent years. After it, no words are needed, if only because it is one of the most eloquent works ever …

Review by  Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun, for En Attendant Nadeau / Mediapart, published May 2018
There are subjects that force the novel to reinvent itself. As the narrator of the last book of Elias Khoury puts it, “I am writing a novel that is unlike any other, because it belongs to a literary genre that has no name and I doubt that it exists “.