Let It Be Morning

de Sayed Kashua

A young Arab journalist returns to his hometown -- an Arab village within Israel -- where his already vexed sense of belonging is forced to crisis when the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggle that is the Middle East. Hoping to reclaim the simplicity of life among kin, the prodigal son returns home to find that nothing is as he remembers: everything is smaller, the people are petty and provincial. But when Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, the village devolves into a Darwinian jungle, where paranoia quickly takes hold and threatens the community's fragile equilibrium. With the enduring moral and literary power of Camus and Orwell, *Let It Be Morning* offers an intimate, eye-opening portrait of the conflicted allegiances of the Israeli Arabs.