Men in the Sun

About the Book

Men in the Sun is Ghassan Kanafani's first and best-known novel. It follows the journey of three Palestinian refugees on the road to Kuwait in the wake of the Nabka. Kanafani's storytelling explores themes of exile, displacement, and the enduring human struggle for dignity.

Over the brief decade of his literary career, Ghassan Kanafani became one of his people's most beloved and prolific voices. His work offers entry into the Palestinian experience of more than a century of resistance to occupation.

About the Author

Born in Akka, northern Palestine, in 1936, Ghassan Kanafani was a prominent and revered spokesman for the Palestinian struggle. Never having finished his university degree, Kanafani was expelled from school for his political engagement. In 1967 Kanafani published On Zionist Literature — a text that examines mid-century European literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Kanafani was the founding editor of its weekly magazine Al-Hadaf. His novels and short stories have been published in sixteen languages.

At his home in Beirut in 1972, the Mossad murdered Kanafani, and his 17-year old niece Lamees Najim, with a car bomb. The obituary in the Lebanese Daily Star called Kanafani "a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."

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