This is young Palestinian author Shada Mustafa’s debut novel – a free-flowing narrative that interrogates, in short, direct sentences, the memories of growing up, falling in love, that keep forcing themselves out to be reckoned with.

Through ceaseless questioning, and the seemingly random revisiting of each of the four “things” she has left behind, the narrator redeems her life from the inexplicable pain and tragic anguish that was her childhood in an occupied and divided land and family. In so doing, Mustafa creates a unique writing style while at the same time allowing the narrative its original, cathartic function, liberating herself from her past, and finding her true self.

Why was she always having to cross the Qalandia checkpoint to see her dad or her mom? Why did they divorce? Why was her mom angry? How could she make her happy? Why was her dad a different man when he came out of the occupier’s prison? What was more important, the cause or the people?

The questions become more urgent when she becomes a student and falls in love. This short novel, original in both subject and narrative technique, was shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Award for Young Authors.

Shada Mustafa is a Palestinian writer, born in 1995. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Geographical Development Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Her debut novel Ma Taraktu Khalfi (Things I Left Behind) was shortlisted for the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the category of Young Author. It was excerpted in Banipal 71 (Summer 2021), translated by Nancy Roberts.

Nancy Roberts is an award-winning translator of contemporary Arabic fiction into English. Roberts has translated a number of fiction works by Egyptian authors, including The Mirage by Naguib Mahfouz, Salwa Bakr’s The Man from Bashmour, (commended for the 2008 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation), Mohamed el-Bisatie’s Over the Bridge and Hala El-Badry’s Muntaha.