'A sublime reading experience: delicate, restrained, surpassingly intelligent, uncommonly poised and truly beautiful' Zadie Smith
**WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARD 2020**
Midhat Kamal - dreamer, romantic, aesthete - leaves Palestine in 1914 to study medicine in France, under the tutelage of Dr Molineu.
Isabella Hammad’s remarkably accomplished debut novel very quickly snares the reader’s attention… Hammad is a natural storyteller... The writing is deeply humane, its wide vision combined with poised restraint… A story of cultures in simultaneous conflict and concord,
The Parisian teems with riches – love, war, betrayal and madness – and marks the arrival of a bright new talent.
Breathtaking… Isabella Hammad establishes herself here as a literary force to be reckoned with.
The Parisian is, in many ways,
an extraordinary achievement.
A stunning 576-page debut, both a lush rendering of Palestinian life a century ago under the British Mandate
and a sumptuous epic about the enduring nature of love… a small, beautiful, human story blazing against the enormity of the sociopolitical one… a novel you sink into.One of the most ambitious first novels to have appeared in years…
Written in soulful, searching prose, it’s a jam-packed epic… Hammad is a natural social novelist with an ear for lively dialogue as well as an ability to illuminate psychological interiority…
Hammad is a writer of startling talent – and The Parisian has the rhythm of life.The Parisian has an up-close immediacy and stylistic panache that are all the more impressive coming from a London-born writer still in her 20s… There are intimidating 19th-century precedents – Tolstoy, Turgenev, Stendhal…
Isabella Hammad has crafted an exquisite novel that, like Midhat himself, delves back into the confusing past while remaining wholly anchored in the precarious present.
Isabella Hammad is the author of
The Parisian and a Granta Best Young Novelist
. She has also been awarded the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Palestine Book Award and a Betty Trask Award. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.