Cactus Pear For My Beloved
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  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781761344978
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $40.00
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Cactus Pear For My Beloved

A Family Story from Gaza

Formats & editions
Tr. Paperback
17 Sep 2024
EBook
17 Sep 2024
Audiobook
17 Sep 2024
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'If there's a more important or timely book in 2024, I'm yet to come across it. Five big shiny stars.'
GOOD READING MAGAZINE
'Samah Sabawi has written a story of courage and struggle. Her generosity is such that above all she has gifted us a story of love of family and country.'
TONY BIRCH

The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland.

Samah Sabawi shares the story of her parents and many like them who were born as their parents were being forced to leave their homelands.

Filled with love for land, history, peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia.

One of the gifts of Samah Sabawi's Baba is to remain open-hearted and optimistic.
  • Published: 17 September 2024
  • ISBN: 9781761344978
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $40.00
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Samah Sabawi

Samah Sabawi is an author, playwright and poet and a recipient of multiple awards both nationally and internationally. Her theatre credits include the critically acclaimed and award-winning plays Tales of a City by the Sea and THEM. In 2020 Samah received the prestigious Green Room Award for Best Writing in the independent theatre category, and was shortlisted for both the NSW and Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. With Stephen Orlo Samah edited the anthology Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas, winner of the Patrick O’Neill Award and she co-authored I Remember My Name: Poetry by Samah Sabawi, Ramzy Baroud and Jehan Bseiso, edited by Vacy Vlazna, winner of the Palestine Book Award. Samah received a Doctor of Philosophy from Victoria University for her thesis titled Inheriting Exile, transgenerational trauma and the Palestinian Australian Identity.

portrait photo of Samah Sabawi

Praise for Cactus Pear For My Beloved

Samah Sabawi has written a story of courage and struggle. Her generosity is such that above all she has gifted us a story of love of family and country.

Tony Birch

Samah Sabawi’s storytelling is wonderfully, dextrously agile. This book is indeed a tapestry; but it is also a magic lantern and an elegant mosaic and a reclaiming and a reassertion of memory and history. It is playful and heartbreaking, sly and true, defiant and tender.

Christos Tsiolkas

It is rare to read a story that feels like a privilege to be entrusted with, but Sabawi's recounting of her parents' displacement is just that. Although the tale of her family's removal from their homeland in Palestine is a heartbreaking story of survival, Sabawi lends compassion and humanity in the ultimate gift of hope.

Kate Weinberg, Marie Claire

Cactus Pear for My Beloved offers a lyrical insight into the humanity of Palestinian survival. Hope springs in the cracks of a broken heart.

Monique Grbec, The Saturday Paper

If there's a more important or timely book in 2024, I'm yet to come across it. Five big shiny stars.

Sarah Kraus, Good Reading

Written with the detail and warmth of a storyteller who wants to commemorate a much-loved subject. Episodic in structure, Cactus Pear for My Beloved eschews explanations and psychologising. Rather, it relies on the vibrancy of its characters and the material details of their world to bring memorable moments to life. Throughout Cactus Pear for My Beloved, Sabawi deftly connects personal stories to wider historical and political contexts.

Michelle Hamadache, The Conversation

A Cactus Pear for My Beloved is as much a tribute to Sabawi’s father and her heritage as it is a harsh reminder of that French expression, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yet it is also tender, full of love and gently funny. The titular cactus pear is a fruit covered in fine sharp needles. Karim used to peel these for Souhaliah who loved the tender delicious flesh within. It is a powerful symbol for this memoir that contains joy, pain and sorrow in equal measure.

Meredith Jaffe, New Voices Down Under