In the 1948 nakba, the "catastrophe" that was the invasion of Palestine leading to the founding of Israel, a baby boy is snatched from his Palestinian mother by an Israeli soldier and delivered to his wife, to be brought up hating Palestinians. Then he meets his twin brother. It's a simple and artful conceit to humanise the cruelty of the Palestinian plight. And interestingly, Abulhawa chooses not to make it the centre of her novel. Rather, Mornings in Jenin is the story of Amal, the twin boys' sister. Orphaned and injured in the 1967 war, she leaves the Jenin refugee camp in which she has grown up for a Jerusalem orphanage, and then faces her early adult years alone in Pennsylvania. She becomes Amy ("Amal without the hope"), and on her return to Lebanon falls in love, only to meet with further tragedy and heartbreak. This is a brave, sad book that tells the story of a nation and a people through tales of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary circumstances. Unsensational, at times even artless, it has a documentary feel that allows events to speak for themselves, and is all the more moving for it.