The latest addition to my website is Ahlam Bsharat‘s الاار للناس الغائبين (Trees for the Absentees). This novella follows the story of a young Palestinian woman, Philistia. Her father is in an Israeli jail. She has helped her grandmother who was both a corpse washer and a midwife/baby washer. The grandmother is now dead. Philistia wants to go to university in Nablus and gets a job as a washer/scrubber in the women’s hammam (public baths) where she sees her dead grandmother. She also sees – first in her dreams and then in the streets – Bayrakdar, imaginary to everyone else but very real to her and they start a relationship. When the Israelis chop down all the olive trees in her village it is Bayrakdar who offers his support. It is short but a highly imaginative tale.