Samir El-Youssef, who was born in Lebanon, has lived in London since 1990.
His short stories in Gaza Blues (2004), co-authored with the Israeli
writer Etgar Keret, drew irreverently on his experience of growing up in a
refugee camp, seemingly in a pot-haze. The Illusion of Return is his first
novel in English, but despite the misleadingly portentous title, it is not
really about a Palestinian "right of return" - which its
narrator rejects as unrealistic. Centred on a meeting in Heathrow airport
between two friends who fled wartorn Lebanon for Britain and the US in the
80s, the novel's heart lies in its narrator's grappling with a past which
includes the death of his sister 10 years earlier and the murder of a
friend.
Like Kashua, El-Youssef is unflinchingly critical of aspects of his
society, not least what he sees as hypocrisy in the treatment of women.
Puncturing myth to allow for grief and understanding, the novel attempts
to reveal a more complex human reality behind the smokescreen of tales of
heroism and martyrdom.
