Second Shoe

Seven days. Seventy-eight years. One family that never stopped waiting. In 1948, a village in Galilee empties overnight. Its people walk north, carrying keys, bread, and the certainty that they will return within days. They do not. The Second Shoe follows a Palestinian family from Saffuriyya through the camps of Lebanon, one single day at a time: 1948, 1953, 1962, 1976, 1982, 1987, and 2026. Adam and Amina tell the story in alternating voices, each in their own words, each remembering what the other cannot bear to say. Between the days, the years pass in silence, and the reader learns what was lost only by what is left unspoken. Beneath the exile runs a quieter grief: a daughter, Amal, who is missing, and a question the family has stopped asking aloud. The novel never tells you where she went. It asks you to carry the question as they do. Set against the cedar hills, the orange memories, and the wars that ruined a beautiful country, The Second Shoe is a novel about home as something you carry rather than a place you reach, and about the love that holds a family together when everything else has been taken. For readers of literary historical fiction, family sagas, and stories of exile and belonging.