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No One Knows Their Blood Type
Shortlisted for the 2025 First Translation Prize from the American Literary Translators Association
Longlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths--of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father--the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren't questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?
Longlisted for the 2025 National Translation Award in Prose from the American Literary Translators Association No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths--of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father--the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren't questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?
Book Details
- Publisher: Cleveland State University Poetry Center
- Publish Date: Oct 1st, 2024
- Pages: 150
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 7.90in - 6.30in - 0.50in - 0.48lb
- EAN: 9798989708413
- Categories: • Literary• World Literature - Middle East - General• Family Life - General
About the Author
Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children's book author. She edited The Book of Ramallah, an anthology of short stories published by Comma Press in 2021. Her children's book A Blue Pond of Questions was translated into English and published by Penny Candy Books. An English translation of her poetry appeared from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Praise for this book
"Abu Al-Hayyat explores the broader political and geographic aspects of Palestinian life under colonial rule while at the same time interweaving the quotidian aspects of life and loss in such settings. Within these frictions of exterior trauma and private contemplations, large constraints and small freedoms, these poems soar." --MANDANA CHAFFA, CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
"No One Knows Their Blood Type rejects the impulse to hyper-explain Palestinian life, instead taking the reader into the inner lives of characters shaped by the exile and instability that have come to define the Palestinian condition. There are no perfect victims here. Instead, we get intimate, honest portraits of actual human beings, in their kindness and cruelty, their failure and triumph. The masterful English translation is a triumph of language over trauma. Through and through, this is a story told by Palestinians, for Palestinians. Now, more than ever, we deserve to tell our stories." --EMAN ABDELHADI
"There's a remarkable coiled power to this slim novel--it moves in unexpected directions, its characters' lives tossed about by the collision of history and personality." --Kamila Shamsie
"No One Knows Their Blood Type offers a gripping, textured vision of what it can feel like to be human amidst colonial dehumanization. In this novel, the deep disruptions of war and oppression sharpen universal family complexities and prod the young Palestinian women at the novel's center to examine their own places in the world. I loved this tender, troubling book." --Katharine Beutner
"Frank, wry, devastating, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat's work is an absolute gift to behold... renewing my faith in language and the houses it can build." --Solmaz Sharif
"Maya's poetry is breathtaking in its specificity and rendering of heart, land, loss, and love alike." --Hala Alyan
"Al-Hayyat's latest devastating and courageous collection captures the precarious everyday lives of Palestinians with enormous empathy and glistening clarity." --Booklist