DVANCE PRAISE FOR THE HOLLOW HALF

A Debutiful Most Anticipated Book of 2025

“How do we come to this life? Is it automatic, by birth? Or must we also choose it? Sarah Aziza's astonishing memoir is a record of a mystery of the self, a woman in the grip of a despair that has too many names or none at all, hiding as it seeks to erase her. To survive she must move towards being, as she says, ‘ambushed by hope.’ We travel with her into that place where even language abandoned her, and her effort to return, yes, alive, maybe even more than that, has lessons for us all. A blazing, hard-won triumph.” 

—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“The Hollow Half catapults every single expectation we have ever had of the memoir genre, and the settled memory. Is it a memoir? It's at least that. But Aziza both longs for and accepts radical tradition and the aches of innovation. The book is body and spirit, full and famished. I'm not sure I've read a book more unafraid of finding free.” 

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, ‘Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.’ The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory.”

—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

“If warring nations were to fall away what would be left but bodies? Sarah Aziza's The Hollow Half brings a Palestinian song and body back to life from the ruins. To sing this blood song she must cross all boundaries, between people, places, histories, and languages. Here is a heart beating, not beaten. The question is, how will we hold such a sacred text?” 

—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

“In the breathtaking, fiercely honest The Hollow Half, Sarah Aziza weaves a genre-bending memoir of body and land, an unflinching look at the tyranny of emotional, physical, and intrapsychic hunger. These hungerings—complex, visceral, ever-present—frame a story of hauntings, erasures, colonization, and the metaphor and reality of Palestine. But The Hollow Half is not merely a dissection of absence; it is an expansion of genre itself, gorgeously blending memoir with dreamwork, ancestral secrets with reclaimed history. Through stunning, transformative prose, Aziza writes both herself—and the reader—towards liberation.”

—Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back

“In a world where ‘survival requires a brief act of insanity,’ Sarah Aziza has given us a miraculous clarity that is nothing short of catastrophic to a global order intent on paving over and dis-remembering Palestinians. Never have I read a book that has made me feel as loved, held, and cared for, in my Palestinian body, as The Hollow Half. Here is return translated, however im/permanently, into a kind of present tense. Here is a capacious dreaming, forming constellar kinship across, against, and despite borders in space-time, while never failing to return us to the body. This is a memoir we have all needed for many lifetimes.”

—George Abraham, author of Birthright and executive editor of Mizna 

“The Hollow Half is a shimmering testament to disciplined love's exigencies and transcendent possibilities. It is a book that all who seek a path beyond the brutal systems and narratives of colonial modernity will return to time and again.”

—Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

“Sarah Aziza’s writing penetrates the heart and the pulse in such a way that you are breathing with her, rapturous against the fate of a body that cannot fully contain you, nor can it be contained. The Hollow Half is a potent and confronting memoir about the perils of our explicable ghosts—whether that be ancestral lineages or the unsatiated dreams of our ancestors or the yearning of something that can be never tasted or quenched—this book shakes you into understanding the devastation of what it means to be alive in a time like this.”

—Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For and Survival Takes A Wild Imagination