The Palestinians as a people are still frequently stereotyped by the international mass media as a nation of terrorists and radicals. The personal accounts collected in this remarkable book go some way to redressing the balance by revealing the human dimension of a suffering nation: the lives of a people in exile or in camps, preoccupied with struggle and survival in a hostile world.

But this is by no means an entirely bleak account: the ordinary Palestinians featured in these vignettes (based on an extensive series of personal interviews by Professor Kamel S. Abu Jaber) describe their everyday existence both simply and poignantly and the eloquence of their tales reveals lives filled with hope, despair, tenderness, love and dreams of success, happiness and - above all else - peace.