Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is a slim collection that certainly carries more weight than its length suggests. It brings together several short stories, including the title novella Men in the Sun, to show what it means to live as a Palestinian in the decades following the mass expulsion Palestinians refer to as the Nakba (what this collection largely discusses the effects of). I can’t lie, I went into this collection with some hesitation. I circled around it for quite some time, filled with apprehension, knowing that what was within its pages was not something that promised me comfort. Once I began though, I found myself absorbed more quickly than expected. Kanafani’s writing has immediate authority and presence on the page; even in translation, you can feel how intentional every word is.
This edition, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick, opens with Men in the Sun, the most known of the collection, and justifiably so. It follows three Palestinian men — Abu Qais, Assad and Marwan — all from different generations, who attempt to travel from Iraq to Kuwait in search of work. They place their hopes in Abul Khaizuran, a Palestinian driver who agrees to take them as long as they hide in the empty tank of his lorry each time they cross a checkpoint. In this, Kanafani builds terrifying suspense through extremely detailed descriptions of oppressive heat that is felt during all of the checkpoints. I felt each emotion so vividly.
“O almighty God, you who have never been with me, who have never looked in my direction, whom I have never believed in, can you possibly be here this time? Just this time?”
I became so aware of the time passing in this story. Each second spent reading heightens awareness of the precious time ticking away, intensifying the impending sense of doom Kanafani crafts. So, when the ending arrived, so evidently constructed from the start, the surprise itself came as a surprise. The characters have such vibrant life within them, such humanity, that it’s difficult to not maintain hope for them as the story progresses. I found myself earnestly rooting for them to make it, despite the clever foreshadowing throughout, and therefore, awareness of what the ending would most likely be as I was reading.The final image, as brutal as it is, delivers like a gut punch. This story is one that lingers, even as you continue on in Kanafani’s collection.
The following stories of this collection are just as worthwhile a read. In their variation of tones and forms, they build a complicated and nuanced picture of displacement, ensuring that the differing perspectives of the characters within these stories give numerous viewpoints into how Palestinian people are affected by the political violence they face. There is, with that, a refusal to tell one type of story — we are instead shown the true feeling of exile across different lives and situations. The Land of Sad Oranges, for example, presents us a child, narrating the moment his family flees their home, focusing on the presence of oranges instead of the actual departure: how something once sweet and abundant, is now bitter, half rotted and impossible to enjoy. The oranges that once signified normalcy become unmoored from that meaning; They no longer carry the comfort of home, but neither do they fully become symbols of exile. Instead, the fruit is simply there – present and rotting – something familiar taken away from them. It’s a subtle yet devastating way of showing a change in relationships to objects or memories that were originally a stable guarantee. Something attainable yet unattainable; something, now, taken away.
“You were huddled there, as far from your childhood as you were from the land of oranges.”
Other stories, such as the final Letter from Gaza, are in an entirely different format. This story is written as a personal letter to a friend abroad, breaking away from the traditional narrative form the collection held throughout. Using this format makes it impossible to separate the personal from the political. We hear from the narrator such frustration at the violence around him, affection for those who remain, grief at what’s already been lost and a form of loyalty he feels for his homeland. His decision to stay in Gaza seems to be an inability, or perhaps refusal, to walk away from what is left behind. He isn’t framed as someone who is right or wrong, just as someone entirely human, struggling with what to do and persuading himself that he’s made the right choice.
“I won’t come to you. But you, return to us! Come back, to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.”
Taken collectively, these short stories create a journey within itself, passing from one to another. They resist the traditional story of conflict, climax and resolution and, instead, show differing perspectives on how deeply political violence affects ordinary people such as you and me. These stories ask the reader to find the politics in the things that don’t usually get labelled as such: regular conversations, your living space or routine. The characters Kafani gives us are those we can’t easily admire or condemn, but are people who feel human. Utilising that humanity, Kafani refuses to let us think of displacement as something held only in the past, despite this being written in 1963. These stories are ones that structurally and emotionally remain unfinished, and in doing so, they highlight the unfinishedness of the world they describe, the conditions they describe are still ongoing.
Ghassan Kanafani reshaped and evolved Palestinian literature. C: AlJazeera
Before reading, I researched the author of this collection, Ghassan Kanafani, who was born in the city of Acre in 1936 and displaced in 1948. He later became a major figure in modern Palestinian literature and political journalism, but was assassinated at the age of thirty-six in Beirut in 1972, by a car bomb that also killed his teenage niece, Lamis Najim. The temptation, with that knowledge, is to read this work of fiction as if its artistic value were secondary to its political purpose. Nevertheless, as I read this collection of short stories, I found it resisting such a singular reduction of meaning. Instead, I read an insistence that political catastrophe impacts everyday human beings, not just the man you see on stage reading a speech on the matter.
I encountered these short stories in late 2025, which means the collection has an unavoidable contemporary mirror. In December 2025, the IPC reported that Gaza was no longer classified as in famine after improved access to humanitarian food delivered following an October 2025 ceasefire, while warning that the situation remained critical and could deteriorate quickly if access collapses again. Even the language of those assessments, “provisional”, “conditional”, “dependent”, feels adjacent to Kanafani’s recurring subject of people’s existence being contingent on systems that can suddenly change. The characters within this collection are confined within structures that constantly and remotely re-classify their needs or re-evaluate their status. To read these stories is to recognise how sharply Kanafani articulates a long stream of violence that has been felt for years, and how personally he renders it on a human to human level. The collection’s power is within personalising the historical and political – how the loss of land becomes the loss of ease in movement; how the loss of ease therefore becomes a loss of dignity in how they get there; how the loss of dignity becomes a loss of the self as they arrive at their destination changed, losing something within themselves the way they had to get themselves there. This focus upon the effects on regular people matters greatly and, though fictionalised, it speaks directly to the realities of the living caught in between the actions of those with more political power.
“Why, O God, must mothers lose their sons?”
There is, finally, the question of how to respond to a book like this as a reader and reviewer, especially as a reader who is not Palestinian. To me, this isn’t a book that asks to be judged on whether its characters are fully developed, or whether the pacing holds. Nor does it lend itself to the instinct to like or dislike, to rate, to recommend. It doesn’t feel appropriate to rate it out of five, because what would be measured? Its emotional impact? Its formal precision? Its historical importance? The desire to quantify doesn’t seem as valuable within this book. With this in mind, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories is a collection I would highly encourage you to read. Stories like these deserve to be read, and although it may not be one I could comfortably rate, it is certainly one I won’t forget.
--
Millie Harris studied English Literature at York St. John University, graduating with a First Class Honours, alongside reviewing books for Zimmer’s Book of the Month column. As Literature Editor, she curates and plans the magazine’s Literature section. Aside from her work at Zimmer, Millie is extremely passionate about film, books and all things media. She spends her spare time researching, reading and being with her cat. Millie has happily been a part of Zimmer since the beginning and has loved every moment!