Amy Abdelnoor's debut novel 'Ever Land' will be released on July 9, 2026, by Penguin UK's imprint Hutchinson Heinemann, after a seven-year writing process rooted in experiences dating back nearly three decades.
Plot and Characters
Set in the early 2000s, the novel follows Dinah, a British-Jewish teenager who moves into a new house built on the ruins of a Palestinian village, and Safa, a Palestinian girl killed in the Six Day War, who searches for her sister Nur from the afterlife.
'The book has been in my heart since I lived in Palestine and in Lebanon,' Abdelnoor told Arab News.
Author's Background
In 1998, at age 20, Abdelnoor volunteered in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon while studying English and Arabic at Cambridge University. She later moved to Ramallah in 2000, experiencing life under Israeli occupation during the Second Intifada.
'It was incumbent on you to come back to the UK and talk about your experiences and share the truth of the Palestinian story,' she noted.
Her Lebanese-Christian grandfather, who came to the UK in 1940, also shaped her heritage.
Inspiration and Research
Abdelnoor returned to diaries, emails, and books from her earlier life when writing the draft. In August 2023, she visited Palestine and the Occupied Territories, witnessing a region 'on edge.' She searched for a destroyed village of a friend, identifying it by cactus plants still growing over rubble.
'I just stood there and thought, the land speaks. The land won't be silenced,' she recalled.
Another inspiration came from a newspaper column about a house mistakenly demolished in America, contrasting with deliberate demolitions of Palestinian homes in the West Bank.
Narrative Choices
Abdelnoor chose to tell the story partly through Dinah, a Jewish teenager, as an invitation for empathy. She recalled an email from a friend saying 'There are two sides to every story,' to which she replied, 'They're wholly unequal.'
'The novel puts you in this geography that you understand before it takes you to a geography that you don't know,' she explained.
Context and Impact
Abdelnoor signed with her agent in June 2023, expecting niche literary fiction. Four months later, Israel's Gaza campaign changed the novel's context. 'My creative development, and the possibility that my book might reach more readers, is happening alongside a genocide,' she said.
She emphasized that art is a form of resistance: 'We're all different instruments in an orchestra and we need all instruments for the whole picture.'
