The Hollow Half

WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARD
Longlisted for the James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Elle, Vulture, BookPage, and Electric Literature
Named a Best New Book by San Francisco Chronicle and Elle
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Ms., Debutiful, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Millions, and RAWI
Write or Die Magazine, A Must Read Book

“In breathtaking prose, Palestinian American journalist Sarah Aziza confronts the looming specter of death in various forms. She writes movingly about recovering from an eating disorder that nearly killed her and delves into her family’s history and what it means to be the descendant of refugees from Gaza.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle

“A powerhouse of a memoir.” —Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

“With grace and rigor, [Aziza] examines an eating disorder alongside family history.” —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

“A remarkable achievement, formally inventive, refreshingly honest, and politically sharp.” —Isle McElroy, A Vulture Best Book of the Year

“Aziza took what a memoir can do and turned it on its head. She plays with style and genre, but also introduces the characters in her past and present with such originality. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.” —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“The Hollow Half is not simply a memoir; it is a meditation on rupture, a lyrical mapping of grief, longing, and the liminal spaces in-between. Told across the fault lines of language and geography, it traverses multiple selves and sites—Palestinian and American, daughter and witness, exile and return—without collapsing them into false unity. Instead, Aziza offers a form that honors fragmentation as its own kind of truth.” —Abdelrahman ElGendy, The Baffler

“As she tracks her movements through memory and dreaming, Aziza invokes the Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake . . . Brilliant and surprising, The Hollow Half conveys memory as a ‘fight that accelerates your return.’”—mónica teresa ortiz, BookPage (starred review)

“A raw and deeply moving account of physical and mental illness and the lasting effects of political oppression on the author’s Gazan refugee family . . . Her account stands as a testament to the resilience of Palestinians.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A poetic and politically potent exploration of survival. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Rabih Alameddine will find much to admire.” —Publishers Weekly

“Even among deftly conveyed personal and geopolitical histories, [Aziza] still writes in a voice soaked with hope; her journey is a gripping, powerful account of finding resilience in the face of destruction and trauma on a generational scale. The Hollow Half is a stunning testimony to what it might mean to continue to resist erasure, and to choose life even when it feels too hard.” —Michelle Anya Anjirbag, Shelf Awareness

“Lyrical, vulnerable, and insightful, this formally inventive, deeply researched memoir masterfully weaves the author’s struggle with anorexia with the history of her family and their multigenerational relationship with their Palestinian homeland.” —Kirkus Reviews

“What is the vocabulary of loss? How much history can a body hold? Visceral, gutting, and stunning, The Hollow Half is one of those books that comes along only rarely. Sarah Aziza has found a way to make language an active witness to one woman’s—and one nation’s—insistence on life.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

“The Hollow Half is a book so stunning in style, form, and sentence-level beauty, it feels stitched together with magic. Only a writer of spectacular talent can so masterfully interrogate the vast, diaphanous spectrum of belonging—from generations-deep root systems upended by monstrous injustice, to the most intimate kind of belonging, within one’s own body. Sarah Aziza is an absolutely exceptional writer, and The Hollow Half is an unforgettable debut.” —Omar El Akaad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, ‘Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.’ The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory.” —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“How do we come to this life? Is it automatic, by birth? Or must we also choose it? Sarah Aziza’s astonishing memoir is a record of a mystery of the self, a woman in the grip of a despair that has too many names or none at all, hiding as it seeks to erase her. To survive she must move towards being, as she says, ‘ambushed by hope.’ We travel with her into that place where even language abandoned her, and her effort to return, yes, alive, maybe even more than that, has lessons for us all. A blazing, hard-won triumph.” —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“If warring nations were to fall away what would be left but bodies? Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half brings a Palestinian song and body back to life from the ruins. To sing this blood song she must cross all boundaries, between people, places, histories, and languages. Here is a heart beating, not beaten. The question is, how will we hold such a sacred text?” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“The Hollow Half is a shimmering testament to disciplined love’s exigencies and transcendent possibilities. It is a book that all who seek a path beyond the brutal systems and narratives of colonial modernity will return to time and again.” —Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

“The Hollow Half catapults every single expectation we have ever had of the memoir genre, and the settled memory. Is it a memoir? It’s at least that. But Aziza both longs for and accepts radical tradition and the aches of innovation. The book is body and spirit, full and famished. I’m not sure I’ve read a book more unafraid of finding free.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“In a world where ‘survival requires a brief act of insanity,’ Sarah Aziza has given us a miraculous clarity that is nothing short of catastrophic to a global order intent on paving over and dis-remembering Palestinians. Never have I read a book that has made me feel as loved, held, and cared for, in my Palestinian body, as The Hollow Half. Here is return translated, however im/permanently, into a kind of present tense. Here is a capacious dreaming, forming constellar kinship across, against, and despite borders in space-time, while never failing to return us to the body. This is a memoir we have all needed for many lifetimes.” —George Abraham, author of Birthright and executive editor of Mizna