Upside-Down Love
A Memoir in Two Voices
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
With a message of hope that is both timely and timeless, Upside-Down Love is an extraordinary memoir—irreverent, funny, and profoundly uplifting—of an Israeli lawyer, a Palestinian professor, and a love that transcends all division.
Osama is a Palestinian professor, originally from Gaza, who cannot leave the West Bank city of Ramallah. Sari is an Israeli-American lawyer and long-distance runner who petitions Israel’s Supreme Court for his right to travel freely. When the case began, neither expected to fall in love—and when it was over, nobody expected their love to endure.
First published in Hebrew in 2021, Osama and Sari’s star-crossed romance—an intimate, vulnerable portrait of an astoundingly resilient Israeli-Palestinian relationship—has since become a beacon of hope in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. Now on its way to becoming an international cult sensation, Upside-Down Love speaks to the unique circumstances of this specific moment in history, while also illustrating a timeless truth: Love will triumph over bigotry and destruction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her heartfelt debut, Israeli American human rights lawyer Bashi recounts how she met and built a family with her Palestinian spouse. Bashi's father was an Iraqi Jew who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. He viewed all Arabs with distrust, whereas Bashi, in 2005, founded Gisha, an organization that offered legal assistance to Palestinians who needed military permits to access work or family members outside of Gaza. It was through that work that Bashi first met her husband, Osama (a pseudonym), who sought permission to study in London in 2006. "We knew what we longed for was forbidden, that it could never happen," Bashi writes of their instant attraction. They married anyway, and started a life in the West Bank, enduring painful experiences including the premature birth of their second child, whom Osama was barred from seeing in the Tel Aviv hospital where she was born. Bashi resists hyperbole, acknowledging that "Osama and I haven't changed the world with our choices.... but we managed to build a good life together, amidst the oppression and attempts to instill fear." This intimate real-life love story brings welcome humanity to a fraught subject.
