Description: An acclaimed Syrian journalist crafts a vital portrait of October 7, 2023, and its aftermath through the harrowing yet life-affirming accounts of 26 Palestinians.
Throughout 2024, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experience of October 7, 2023, and what their life has been like since that pivotal date. In Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life--a title adapted from one of the flyers dropped on the residents of Gaza minutes before a bombing--Yazbek captures the raw, chilling accounts of ordinary civilians aged 13 to 65, who have witnessed what history may remember as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Their stories reveal a nightmarish dystopia, where each survivor has endured unimaginable loss--homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated--and many have been treated in hospitals ravaged by Israeli attacks. But these survivors remain determined to share their experiences, and cling to the hope that their voices will resonate. More than a record of horrors for posterity, this breathtaking collection testifies to the power of education and writing, which remind us of our common humanity.Review Quotes: "[Yazbek] is widely regarded as one of the most important voices documenting conflict in the Middle East today. Her latest work...is a vital, harrowing document...a human portrait of one of the most devastating military offensives in recent history." --The Mirror, 6 Unmissable Books Coming Out This Month
"Since the start of Israel's genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence firsthand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity's capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain, and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect, and humility. She has once again modeled what it means to be a keeper of humanity's memory." --Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction "A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced. Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away." --Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath "This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory, and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love." --A. L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country "These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since October 7, 2023. Despite Israel's genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies--shared with Yazbek and translated by Price--now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you--we--have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them." --Natasha Soobramanien, coauthor (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia