From Lebanon to Galilee, from Tunisia to Jordan, the history of the Palestinians is achingly complicated. Writing a definitive epic on the subject seems a doomed project from the start, but Elias Khoury, a former Fatah fighter born into a Lebanese Christian family, knows a few stories.

Rather than allowing the 50 years of thorny political history to overtake him, Khoury chooses to focus on the lives of his characters, especially the convoluted love between Youssef and his wife, Nahila. The book is mainly narrated by a doctor, Khalil, who tells a series of stories to the comatose, aged Youssef. As distractions and associations bubble to the surface, Khalil's tales digress far away from their beginnings. Complex yet accessible, Gate of the Sun reads like a stunning testament to the power of anecdotes, which can bring memories closer or keep the painful ones at bay.

This is clearest when Khalil tells his comatose patient of the Sabra and Chatila massacre, practically unavoidable in a Palestinian epic. He relates it in the words of a journalist who interviewed an ex-Phalange militia boss. In a triply-framed story, we hear how the boss, dazzled by cocaine and flares, lined up children and shot them in the head to see how many skulls his bullets would travel through. Reality blurs into recollection, secrets lose meaning, and the ownership of memories becomes confused with the passage of time. Ground down by the weight of their history, Khoury’s characters turn to recounting their experience in order to work through it.

-Andy Warner