A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction; Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, The New Republic, and the Financial Times

In A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall presents an indelibly human portrait of the struggle over Israel/Palestine and a new understanding of the tragic history and reality of one of the most contested places on earth.  Thrall’s book is an intimate account of a deadly accident outside Jerusalem that unravels over the course of one revealing, heartbreaking day.

Five-year-old Milad Salama is excited for a school trip to a theme park on the outskirts of Jerusalem. On the way, his bus collides with a semitrailer. His father, Abed, gets word of the crash and rushes to the site. The scene is chaos—the children have been taken to different hospitals in Jerusalem and the West Bank; some are missing, others cannot be identified. Abed sets off on an odyssey to learn Milad’s fate. It is every parent’s worst nightmare, but for Abed it is compounded by the maze of physical, emotional, and bureaucratic obstacles he must navigate because he is Palestinian. He is on the wrong side of the separation wall, holds the wrong ID to pass the military checkpoints, and has the wrong papers to enter the city of Jerusalem. Abed’s quest to find Milad is interwoven with the stories of a cast of Jewish and Palestinian characters whose lives and histories unexpectedly converge.

Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books and has been translated into more than twenty languages. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project and has taught at Bard College. Razia Iqbal is an anchor of Newshour on the BBC World Service, the current affairs program with 12.5 million listeners in the U.S. and millions more elsewhere. For the last three decades she has reported from around the world, including as a special correspondent for BBC TV. Iqbal has presented the in-depth interview series Witness History, Talking Books and Dream Builders as well as documentaries for both radio and TV. She is a frequent moderator at political and literary events.

This event is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books and Princeton University’s Humanities Council.