Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life
Voices from Gaza
Samar Yazbek author Leri Price translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publishing:21st May '26
£14.99
This title is due to be published on 21st May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. From these encounters comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a bombing, the book’s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans. That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and mechanisms of cruelty that defy comprehension. In gathering these testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and the survivors’ determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.
‘A work of profound ethical significance, a direct offering of words from voices that should never be silenced.Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life is almost too painful to read, but so deeply humane and important that it compels us not to look away.’
— Preti Taneja, author of Aftermath
‘These testimonies of the unconscionably injured are among hundreds of thousands such testimonies emerging from Gaza since 7 October 2023. Despite Israel’s genocidal drive to silence Palestinian voices, despite Western complicity in this silencing, these twenty-six testimonies – shared with Yazbek and translated by Price – now exist as pages. If, like me, you have the means and the capacity to read them in all their blistering detail, and if you too have no personal knowledge of the unspeakable zannanat that plague these pages, then you – we – have a particular duty: not only to read these precious words, but to act on them.’
–– Natasha Soobramanien, co-author (with Luke Williams) of Diego Garcia
‘Powerful and moving…bears comparison with George Orwell’s Homage To Catalonia as a work of literature, Yazbek is a superb narrator ... this is how she crosses the line from journalism to high literary art.’
— Andrew Hussey, Observer (praise for The Crossing)
‘An eloquent, gripping and harrowing account of the country’s decline into barbarism by an incredibly brave Syrian.’
— Barry Andrews, Irish Times (praise for The Crossing)
ISBN: 9781804272411
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages