Description
“Guillaume Lavallée has written a book that is, I must say, magnificent—and instructive too—about what Gaza was like before the October 7th attack . . . It’s a bitter-sweet book about this conflict, a very human one too.”—Guy A. Lepage, Tout le monde en parle, Ici Radio-Canada
Can one be nostalgic for what was unbearable?
After Hamas’s murderous attacks on Israel on October 7th and that nation’s war of eradication against Hamas, Gaza was left in rubble, with tens of thousands dead and many more injured. But this was not all that was lost in the onslaught. History, culture, communities and hard-won ways of life were irrevo-cably damaged and destroyed by the Israeli army’s bombs, bullets, and bulldozers, and whatever rises out of the ashes of Gaza will never be the same.
Guillaume Lavallée takes us with him to the heart of Gaza, a place where life was lived on borrowed time, a precarious exist-ence, prodigiously human but forever bound to a conflict that had become the lifeblood of its children. It is to his own mother, whose memory is fading, that he recounts what Gaza was like, a place where the earth, the sky, and the sea had closed in, evok-ing the fire that engulfed it, but also the stubborn fire of hope that, both before and after the 7th, refused to die.
Praise for Gaza Before the Seventh
“Guillaume Lavallée has written a book that is, I must say, magnificent—and instructive too—about what Gaza was like before the October 7th attack . . . It’s a bitter-sweet book about this conflict, a very human one too.”
—Guy A. Lepage, Tout le monde en parle, Ici Radio-Canada
