Naeem Murr

But I do think he's good because I think only good people are worried about whether they're good or not.

People who are not good don't worry about, you know, whether they're good or not.

But as I say, he is a deeply flawed character and he behaves a number of times very badly.

Yeah, I mean, that was there was a real struggle over that, you know, whether we should change the title or not.

I think there was concern.

I mean, you've got to be straightforward.

Anything to do with the Palestinian Israeli situation is sort of immediately brings up a kind of the question of partisanship, the question of, you know, is this just going to be a piece of propaganda?

Right.

You know, am I going to create an idealized Palestinian who's being, you know, tortured by by monstrous Israelis?

And I think what the publishing house was concerned about was that when people saw that title, which I think a lot of people loved, and I thought it was, I think it's a great title, is that their approach to the book would be very different.

What they would be looking for in the book would be very different.

The things that you get early on in a book, whether it's just a piece of information.

I originally opened the book with

Dimra watching the television, watching some collaborators, because it opens right at the end of the Lebanese civil war.

So that's between, you know, Hamas has just got into power,

And right when Hamas gets into power that they have a sort of civil war with Fatah on the streets and there's lots of people killed during that.

So I opened it originally with her looking at these collaborators, the bodies of these collaborators, you know, in a sort of burnt out house.

And again, that was changed because, you know, it was believed that we should enter their lives in a sort of pure way and that the past should be revealed slowly, sort of unraveled slowly through the course of the book, as opposed to people immediately

thinking, okay, this is going to be about, you know, purely about the conflict and it's going to be focused on the conflict when really it's focused on the building, on the relationships and on this sort of complex interaction between the past in Gaza and the present and how, you know, all of these things are incredibly porous.

You know, you have the city of Chicago, which is sort of implicitly connected to Gaza, you know, the number of murders,