The Way to the Spring | Granta

  • Published: 30/03/2017
  • ISBN: 9781783783113
  • 129x20mm
  • 448 pages

The Way to the Spring

Ben Ehrenreich

Over the past three years, American writer Ben Ehrenreich has been travelling to and living in the West Bank, staying with Palestinian families in its largest cities and its smallest villages. He has witnessed the extremes to which they are pushed, the daily deprivation and oppression that they face, and the strategies they construct to survive it – stoicism, resignation, rebellion and stubborn defiance. In The Way to Spring, he describes the cruel mechanics of the Israeli occupation and the endless absurdities and tragedies it engenders: the complex and humiliating machinery of the checkpoints, walls, courts and prisons; the steady, strangling loss of land that has been passed down for generations; the constant ebb and flow of deadly violence.

Blending political and historical context with riveting personal stories, The Way to Spring is a testimony, a provocation, and an unflinching act of witnessing.

Powerful... Palestinian lives matter to Ehrenreich, and he writes about them from the bottom-up, with hard-boiled lyricism, novelistic intimacy and a revolutionary's sense of urgency. [This] is more than a work of journalism. It is a freedom song, burning with humanity... Heartbreaking and joyful

Adam Shatz

The myriad ordeals suffered by the Palestinian people during the last eighty years are minutely reported here. It's a chronicle of their daily lives. Read it! It recognises and respects hope

John Berger

Ben Ehrenreich's rendition of the Palestinian experience is powerful, deep and heartbreaking, so much closer to the ground than the Middle East reporting we usually see. I wish there were more writers as brave

Adam Hochschild, author, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

The Author

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors and one non-fiction book, The Way to the Spring. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine and the London Review of Books, among others. A recipient of the National Magazine Award, he lives in Los Angeles.

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