Mind Platter

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

Composed some time between the middle of the seventh and the end of the tenth century of the first millennium, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is one of the important Northern epics and a classic of European literature.
In his new translation, Seamus Heaney has produced a work which is both true, line by line, to the original poem, and an expression, in its language and music, of something fundamental to his own creative gift.

From Najwa Zebian—celebrated Lebanese-Canadian poet, speaker, and educator—comes a highly personal and moving second collection.

In The Nectar of Pain, Zebian sheds light on the feelings and experiences that emerge from a painful heartbreak. She writes that the process of cleansing oneself of that pain—day by day, hour by hour, and second by second—is the real work of healing.

With uncommon warmth and wisdom, Zebian empowers all who have lost to let go of anger and transform their suffering into the softness, sweetness, and beauty of nectar. She holds her readers by the hand as they heal.

A deeply moving, gorgeously illustrated short story for people of all ages from the international bestselling author of The Kite Runner, brought to life by Dan Williams's beautiful illustrations.

On a moonlit beach a father cradles his sleeping son as they wait for dawn to break and a boat to arrive. He speaks to his boy of the long summers of his childhood, recalling his grandfather's house in Syria, the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, the bleating of his grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots. And he remembers, too, the bustling city of Homs with its crowded lanes, its mosque and grand souk, in the days before the sky spat bombs and they had to flee. When the sun rises they and those around them will gather their possessions and embark on a perilous sea journey in search of a new home.

Khaled Hosseini is one of the most widely read and beloved authors. His novels The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns and And the Mountains Echoed have sold over 55 million copies all over the world. Hosseini is a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, and lives in northern California.

Dan Williams is a London-based artist whose illustrations accompanied an extract of A Thousand Splendid Suns in the Guardian when it was first published 15 years ago. His work has also appeared in National Geographic, Rolling Stone and the Wall Street Journal, amongst many other publications. dan-williams.