Gaza: A Love Story

The year is 1990, and Hilary falls in love. She sets aside her career plans to marry a Palestinian physician and move to his hometown of Gaza City. The Intifada is still raging and America is about to enter the Gulf War.

Hilary finds love in her marriage and family, friends and neighbors of different faiths, the local organizations she works for, and the land and sea itself. She shares the hopes of so many people in Gaza as a peace process begins to unfold.

From one season to the next, from one political event to the next, Hilary encounters memorable situations and characters. Everyone in this lovable, beleaguered place – from the most obscure to the renowned and the famous – has a story to tell or a lesson to teach. Is anyone paying attention?

Time and again, joy and hope triumph over frustration and despair. Yet after five years of testing limits and escaping trouble, Hilary reluctantly chooses her immediate family’s well-being over a people and a place she has come to love. A generation later, a new war in Gaza brings all the emotions and some of the people back to her in America. How do you find hope all over again?

The first reviews are in!

"News about Gaza is often reduced to numbers of victims and grim accounts of destruction, obscuring the humanity of the people who call it home. Hilary Tarazi’s beautifully-written memoir of her Gaza years introduces readers to some of those people, underscoring the incredible tragedy of what has been lost. Seeing daily life in Gaza through the eyes of an American who is not Palestinian also makes it easier for American readers to relate. I recommend this memoir highly."
-- Michael Kinnamon
author of A Rooftop in Jerusalem

"Hilary Tarazi was twenty eight years old when she moved from the United States to Gaza in the autumn of 1990. In her meticulous and moving new memoir, she takes us into the world she found there, defined not by the borders imposed on it or the threat of violence that hung over its streets but by the quiet power of family, faith, community, and hope. A place of profound beauty, now buried in rubble."
-- Kevin Boyle
author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age