Books Found in Translation Found in Translation: Palestine +100, Edited by Basma Ghalayini A speculative look at Palestine’s near future. By Hache Pueyo | Published on November 5, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share Found in Translation is a bimonthly column reviewing books translated to English in a variety of speculative shapes. Some traditional, some experimental, some told through cultural narratives that might seem peculiar if you’re not used to them, but all have the same unifying factor: there is always more out there. Every day spent away from Palestine, in the life of a Palestinian refugee, is one that they believe brings them a day closer to their return. Dystopia, from the Ancient Greek dys- (“bad”) and -topia (“place”), is a word used to characterize future or alternate states that are extreme in how oppressive, violent and unjust they are to human life. How to call, then, the science fiction and imagined futures of a society that is undergoing genocide? Whose people have been driven out of their homes, bombed, imprisoned, tortured, murdered? One thing is certain: everyone has the right to exist and conceptualize their experiences through art, and it is impossible and unfair to ask artists to filter massive suffering out of their creative input. The central theme of Palestine +100 is to imagine the country in the year of 2048, exactly one century after the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing, mass killing, and displacement of Palestinians that led to the creation of the state of Israel. Twelve writers tried to answer the difficult question posed by editor Basma Ghalayini with stories that range from the very worst, with horrific new technologies, to fraught peace agreements that play with ideas of the two state solution and the erasure of individual and political memory. Not every short story of the anthology is a work in translation, but the bulk of the book was, considering that a considerable portion of it is composed by the last novella. Still, I decided to review all of them because even the authors who wrote in English are not doing so as native speakers, but as refugees, with cultural references and linguistic patterns that come from Arabic and other languages, a reality I understand well as both a multi-lingual author and an author in translation. Song of the Birds (Saleem Haddad) opens the anthology with a strong and haunting concept: in a liberated Gaza, suicides are growing among the youth, and a girl whose brother has recently died starts seeing visions of a destroyed land. The result is a chilling story that reads at times like horror—how could it be anything else?—as it explores a different stage of occupation, in which even hope and longing can be used as colonial tools. In Sleep it Off, Dr. Schott (Selma Dabbagh), a future is characterized by states of extreme surveillance. A young woman is hired to monitor the potentially romantic relationship between an Israeli and a Palestinian researcher and regrets what she finds. The story is told through logs, recordings and messages, and while it might cause some initial confusion, the format is fun and makes itself understood soon enough. N (Majd Kayyal, tr. Thoraya El-Rayyes) presents a quieter tale, in which the so-called two-state solution takes literal form: after the complete destruction of Gaza, Israel is pressured to accept the liberation of Palestine, and an amend establishes the two countries will exist henceforth, occupying the same land in different realities that can be accessed through tightly contained borders, but only the Palestinians born after the amend can take this trip. The next story, The Key (Anwar Hamed, tr. Andrew Leber) is another striking story that reads more as horror than science fiction. After decades of discussing the Palestinian question, Israeli scientists invent a way to keep both sides in the same land by creating invisible walls everywhere that only people with the right codes can cross, but this backfires when Israelis start hearing home invasions that are not happening, feeling always on the verge of seeing someone enter their house. It’s a clever way of conceptualizing the keys kept by survivors of the Nakba as a fear of the settler. In Digital Nation (Emad El-Din Aysha), a cyberattack ensures that every Israeli network and device are converted into Arabic. Society quickly collapses as automatic cars stop working, every data is displayed in a language most don’t understand, radios only play Arab music, and media is entirely catered to Palestinians, leading to generalized confusion and, eventually, to the creation of a unified Palestinian state. Personal Hero (Abdalmuti Maqboul, tr. Yasmine Seale) takes a different and moving approach to virtual realities—a common theme in the anthology—as it recreates Palestinian heroes through VR, in particular revolutionary leader Abd Al-Qadir al-Husayni, killed in 1948, through a meeting with his elderly daughter. In a future where environmental issues have led citizens to receive a lifemask at birth in order to breathe, a young man seeking revenge starts working for the man he wants to kill. The world of Vengeance (Tasnim Abutabikh) might be an unkind one, but its characters refuse to be, finding ways to protect each other and their cultural identities despite the weight of injustice. After another round of invasions fragments Palestine into isolated city-states, the newly founded Gaza City Republic has spent years rebuilding into a high tech country in a period of tense peace. In Application 39 (Ahmed Masoud), two brothers who survived the previous war decided to play a prank: submit an application for Gaza to host the Olympic Games. To their surprise—and everyone else’s—the application is accepted, leading to a series of diplomatic incidents, some of them amusing, some extremely painful. The Association (Samir El-Youssef, tr. Ralph Cormack) displays a future where peace is achieved only through a denial of the past that is so extreme studying history is essentially illegal. A journalist that never questioned this new reality starts going down the rabbit hole after a historian is assassinated, giving a noir touch to a story that is short but intriguing. The future in Commonplace (Rawan Yaghi) is not so different from the present. Bombs and attacks are still part of daily life, and a dealer moves through his day as he thinks of his brilliant and lovable sister who was tortured and left to die sometime in the past. This is the most internal story of the anthology, and, like N, the one most focused on family connections. A technological blackout drives Palestinians and Israelis out of their houses, and confusion turns into fear as a spaceship approaches. Final Warning (Talal Abu Shawish, tr. Mohamed Ghalainey) might be the most hopeful story of the entire anthology, and although the premise is fairly straightforward, it offers a touching possibility of connection in the shape of alien invaders. The last and longest, The Curse of the Mud Ball Kid (Mazen Maarouf, tr. Jonathan Wright), is a novella divided in several chapters that work as a patchwork of fragments of a bleak world in which only one Palestinian remains, but instead of being seen as the ultimate victory of occupation, he’s seen as a breathing time bomb, storing within him the energy of all those who were killed. If he dies, everyone else dies with him, a problem that creates a delicate balance in a story that is both science fiction and magical realism. Palestine +100 could be brushed aside as too bleak, but the book doesn’t cause a sense of defeat: instead, it reinforces the hopes for a Palestine with a future. Hope is present from start to finish, in fact, appearing sometimes as glimpses rather than happy endings, as reminders that human connections are precious, and that collective memory is a goal worth fighting for, even—or especially—after liberation.[end-mark] Palestine +100 was originally published in 2019 in the UK (Comma Press/Deep Vellum), and features work in translation from Arabic to English. Buy the Book Palestine +100 Edited by Basma Ghalayini Buy Book Palestine +100 Edited by Basma Ghalayini Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget The post Found in Translation: <i>Palestine +100</i>, Edited by Basma Ghalayini appeared first on Reactor.