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Two Palestinians search for a language of love amid the ruins of dispossession.
Leila, a Palestinian Canadian film scholar, joins a delegation of academics on her first journey to Occupied Palestine. What begins as an intellectual pilgrimage becomes an intimate, destabilizing return to an ancestral land her family was exiled from. There, she meets Khaled—a younger Palestinian man who pulls her into a mesmeric trance of desire, curiosity, and confrontation. Their brief, charged affair unfolds in a landscape shaped by rupture and resistance, each of them bearing different inheritances of the same loss. Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning—a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.
“Employing a poet’s linguistic precision and a historian’s archival eye, [Matuk] offers a poignant meditation on displacement, colonial violence, and the fragmentation and re-fragmentation of Palestinian identity.” — The Walrus
“Leila and Khaled, unapologetic and unforgettable, are elegantly crafted through this novel’s every moment of revelation, nuance, and moving lyricism. A stirring debut.” —Canisia Lubrin, author of Code Noir
“An unflinching exploration of Palestinian resistance and a love story teeming with passion and pathos. Bold, ambitious, startling in its moral clarity and utterly engrossing.” — Jasmine Sealy, author of The Island of Forgetting
“Leila & Khaled is a highly realistic novel, a love affair superimposed on some of the most contested territory in the world.” —California Review of Books
“A torrid, deeply felt romance … Brimming with erudition and luxuriously researched history.” —Saeed Teebi, author of Her First Palestinian
“[Matuk’s] understated prose shines most when it depicts Leila reflecting on diasporic identity, exile, dispossession, and how love can be a powerful form of resistance. Few novels succeed, as Leila & Khaled does, in pivoting between meditative scenes and nail-biting ones with such swift precision.” — Montreal Review of Books
“Leila and Khaled impressively demonstrates how naturally politics permeates the most intimate aspects of human relationships … Remarkable novel.” — Literatur. Review
“Skilfully and sympathetically told, Leila and Khaled is a powerful story of love, fate, resistance, privilege, and bearing witness.” —Christine Estima, author of Letters to Kafka
“Leila and Khaled is an evocative, moving, and crucial novel that affirms the power of storytelling as an essential act of resistance.” —Kathryn Mockler, author of Anecdotes
“With sumptuous prose and heartrending moral clarity, Leila and Khaled triumphs.” —Kathy Friedman, author of All the Shining People
“Written with a poet’s fierce attention to language, cinematic presence, and searing moral precision.” —Anna Swanson, author of The Garbage Poems