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Series
The Palestinian Comedy is Ibrahim Nasrallah’s open-ended cycle of independent novels reconstructing Palestinian history across roughly two and a half centuries. The books share a historical project rather than recurring protagonists, moving between regions, families and political eras while treating each volume as a standalone novel.
The Lanterns of the King of Galilee reaches back to the eighteenth-century rule of Dahir al-Umar and his attempt to establish autonomous power in Galilee, while Time of White Horses follows a village family from late Ottoman rule through the British Mandate and the Nakba. Together they show the cycle’s range from political biography and state-building to multigenerational social history; no fixed English reading order is imposed.
Reading order
On the shores of Lake Tiberias, Dahir al-Umar al-Zaydani rises from the Zayadina clan to become the dominant ruler of eighteenth-century Galilee. Through alliances with villagers, Bedouin tribes, merchants and religious communities, he takes Tiberias, Safed and Acre and attempts to turn local authority into an…
In the Palestinian village of Hadiya, Hajj Mahmud, his son Khaled and his grandson Naji inherit a fierce attachment to their land, their community and the white horses entwined with the family’s fortunes. Their story begins in the closing decades of Ottoman rule, when local feuds,…