EXODUS OF THE STORKS

Walid Nabhan
Translated from the Maltese by Albert Gatt

  An important novel from the Middle East. A feverish stream-of-consciousness novel which captures the contemporary middle eastern experience of upheaval and displacement.

  Backed by a publicity campaign from FMcM.

Nabil, a Palestinian exile who has made his life on the Mediterranean island of Malta, has his equilibrium shattered when he receives a phone call telling him that his father has died in Jordan. This news releases a flood of memories centred on the unending tragedy of the Arab world. As he reflects on his father’s death, Nabil is forced to confront his Palestinian roots. Born in 1967, he had been involved in the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians at the end of the Six-Day War. Like so many of these displaced and disenfranchised people, his family spent years moving around the Middle East, including neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. And when Nabil finally settles in Malta he discovers in its hybrid culture of east and west a pale shadow of home.

Nabil’s meditations encompass the entire Arab world, with its colonial past, its post-colonial legacy, its fragmentation, human suffering and political turmoil. Part stream of consciousness and part history of the Middle East, Exodus of the Storks is an ambitious literary achievement, as Walid Nabhan movingly evokes the Arab experience. It is a novel for our times of international upheaval and displacement.

WALID NABHAN was born in Jordan in 1966 to a Palestinian family who fled to Amman from their home village near Hebron during the 1948 Palestinian exodus. He arrived in Malta in 1990 and studied laboratory technology. He then enrolled at Bristol University in the UK, graduating in biomedical sciences, before gaining a masters degree in human rights and democratization at the University of Malta. In addition to his novel Exodus of the Storks he has  published two collections of short stories and one of poetry. The novel was awarded the Maltese National Book Prize in 2014 and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2017.