Recognising the Stranger

Recognising the Stranger combines intellectual brilliance with moral clarity and profound resoluteness of purpose. This is a book that calls us to witness our place in history. Isabella Hammad deserves our thanks for sharing it with the world -- Sally Rooney
A pitch-perfect example of how the novelist can get to the heart of the matter better than a million argumentative articles. Hammad shows us how the Palestinian struggle is the story of humanity itself, and asks us not to look away but to see ourselves -- Max Porter
Hammad’s writing burns with fierce intelligence, humane insight and righteous anger. For those at risk of despair, doubtful of the role literature has to play in times of crisis, it is a reminder of the radical potential of reading and the possibility of change -- Olivia Sudjic
Recognising the Stranger is a rigorous interrogation of the power of narrative, its usefulness, its various forms, and the ways it shapes our modes of being in the world. It speaks to literature’s capacity to invoke moments of recognition, and pushes us, as readers, to reconsider the function of storytelling within structures of oppression. It does this with a deep sense of conviction and moral clarity conveyed by a writer who is, by all accounts, a supremely gifted communicator, and we are all the better for it -- Michael Magee
Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing -- Rashid Khalidi