BPS Review : A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall September 2025

I think one of the words I scribbled down most often in this discussion was ‘osmosis’. No matter how we approached this novel, we all agreed that by the end it had filled us with insights and new knowledge of just how difficult life is for Palestinians living under Israeli rule.

We were all using the paperback copy, so perhaps in the original hardback the maps were easier to understand, but they added nothing to our reading experience! Similarly, the character list at the front – short of explaining that these were all actual people – added a pressure to try and ‘lock in’ each character which was perhaps an added distraction from just following the narrative as best we could, described as ‘choppy’ and ‘difficult.’ Even the title ‘ A Day in the Life ’ was mentioned by several as being somewhat misleading.

If the structure is complicated – it just reflects the situation on the ground.  With the hindsight of finishing, it was a clever build up to the main event, the bus crash, and then with the follow on ‘ripples’ of effect after the incident. The writing style is a mix of reportage and narrative which does not feel awkward, and which tries hard to convey the different characters’ experiences.  Many of us felt uncomfortable with the Palestinian culture, with its overtones of patriarchy and misogyny. Abed, our ‘hero’ is certainly not without character flaws, but he is presented without a sugar coating and without judgement.

I have deliberately left our ‘scoring’ of this book to the end, because so many of our views and opinions felt weighted by the ‘whole’ of what we had learned, rather than the irritations of the reading experience.  Whilst the annoyances got to about a quarter of us (3.5/5 or less), the remaining three-quarters rated it 4/5 or higher. People noted the importance of this book ‘bearing witness’ to actual events and forcing us to engage with individual experience, rather than the passive in /out of watching news on television.  Perhaps it is even one of the key reasons we read at all, recognising that good writing can shine a light on things that we would never find on our own.

I leave the last words to Colum McCann, he who has done so much to bring a human face to the ongoing conflicts in the area. The book “does what all good stories should do, it unfolds both minutely and epically at the same time. It does not moralise, and yet it does not shirk its responsibility to knock our sense of comfortable balance all to hell.”