Three survivors circle a village, a death, and one another. When he was seven years old, the acclaimed Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan moved with his family to a Karameh refugee camp east of the River Jordan. That camp--a fierce center of Palestinian resistance following the Six-Day War and the site of major devastation when Israel razed it following the Battle of Karameh in 1968--serves as the setting for Zaqtan's first prose work to appear in English, Describing the Past . This novella is a singular coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of historic upheaval. It stands as an elegy for the loss of a childhood friend, and for childhood itself, brought back to life here as if dreams and memories have seamlessly merged. The result is a new state of being--an altered consciousness and a profound way of remembering the world.