The Palestinian Comedy

The Palestinian Comedy is Ibrahim Nasrallah’s open-ended cycle of independent novels reconstructing Palestinian history across roughly two and a half centuries. The books share a historical project rather than recurring protagonists, moving between regions, families and political eras while treating each volume as a standalone novel.

The Lanterns of the King of Galilee reaches back to the eighteenth-century rule of Dahir al-Umar and his attempt to establish autonomous power in Galilee, while Time of White Horses follows a village family from late Ottoman rule through the British Mandate and the Nakba. Together they show the cycle’s range from political biography and state-building to multigenerational social history; no fixed English reading order is imposed.