Faculty Member Naeem Murr on His Forthcoming Novel, "Bye-Bye Palestine"

I’ve been working for nearly twenty years on a novel based loosely on the lives of two of my uncles, Palestinians who lost their homes in 1948 during the Nakba. Three years ago, on a break from this project, I got an idea for what I thought would be a short story about a man from Gaza forced to deal with a difficult person who moves into his condo building. In a condo, people have to manage and share the same space, making it a microcosm of the conflict from which that man had escaped. This story felt as if it had been gestating in me for the many years I’d struggled with the other novel. Ready to be written, it became quickly populated by characters who began to tell their own stories. I finished a good draft of the novel almost on the day the current conflict in Gaza exploded. The book took me about two years, which is quick for me.

A synopsis of Bye-Bye Palestine: Jack Shaban and his wife, Dimra, emigrated from Gaza to Chicago during the First Gulf War. Bye-Bye Palestine takes place between the election of Hamas in 2006 and the 2009 Gaza War—the worst flare-up of hostilities between Israelis and Palestinians until the current conflict. When Marcia, a troubled, aggressive single mother, moves into the basement apartment of Jack’s condo building, he is forced to mediate between her and the other condo owners. This increasingly bitter conflict, exacerbated by the global financial crisis, returns Jack and Dimra to the disturbing and shameful reasons they fled Gaza during the First Intifada. It also puts pressure on a secret double life Jack’s been leading in America for over a decade.

Bye-Bye Palestine is due to be published by Norton in Jan/Feb 2026.