The Man Who Read Books

Hidden between the smoking rubble of Gaza and the yellowing pages of his books, an elderly bookseller reads. One morning, during a ceasefire, a young photojournalist chances upon him in the narrow alleys of the city. As he raises his camera to take the shot, the bookseller calls out to him and asks him to listen to his story first, for 'Isn't there a story behind every gaze? The story of a life. Sometimes of an entire nation.'

Nabil al-Jaber's story is the odyssey of a man who chose words as refuge, resistance and homeland. From exile to imprisonment, political activism to disillusionment, a love of theatre to his own love affairs, watching your children grow up to the tragedies that tear your loved ones away from you, his voice guides us through a narrative at once historical and deeply intimate. In a world where bombs could easily have the final word, he reminds us that books are our greatest chance for survival - not to escape reality, but to inhabit it humanely and fully. For, in the eye of destruction, to read is a radical act.