THE HAIR OF THE PIGEON IS OUT NOW – 01 APR 2026 IN AUSTRALIA(UWAP) – 01 JUNE IN THE USA(GODINE)
Booksandpublishing writes:
The Hair of the Pigeon (Mohammed Massoud Morsi, UWA Publishing).
Egyptian-Danish-Australian writer Mohammed Massoud Morsi’s The Hair of the Pigeon is a nexus; a place of struggle-scarred pasts and children rushed into maturity. Morsi crafts a 3-dimensional community that is as detailed in its day-to-day kindnesses as it is honest towards misdeeds and negative behaviours. Memories of the camp haunt The Hair of the Pigeonep cast of characters long after Syria’s crackdowns and human-made calamities send them careening over border adito doubtful, uncertain futures, where cycles of grief and closely held secrets wait to unearth themselves on foreign soil. Overcoming a slight tendency toward over-sentimentality through one punchy, event-filled chapter after another, stories accumulate via the protagonist-narrator’s limited perspective to create an intuitive sense of time’s passage. Morsi’s style is
delightfully sparing in literary ornament, instead employing hard-working symbolic figures, crisp imagery and endearing dialogue. With journalistic diligence, broader historical arcs and region-wide socio-political movements are encoded in the spaces between anecdotes, often manifesting in the characters’ daily gripes. As settler-colonial displacement and state-backed mass violence persist, readers worldwide hold the power to prevent the humanity of the Palestinian people from becoming a casualty of conflict. Echoing the portraits of resilience found in Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry collection Forest of Noise, Morsi’s well-executed novel safeguards Arab asylum seekers’ experiences in the unassailable realm of literature.
Get it at your local bookstore or at UWA Press!
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