Leila and Khaled
A Novel
by Nyla Matuk
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Pub Date Aug 11 2026 | Archive Date Not set
House of Anansi Press Inc. | House of Anansi Press
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Description
A decolonial vacation romance between two Palestinians—one raised in exile, the other rooted on the land—searching for home in each other.
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.
One night in Khaled’s hotel room, Leila listens as he recounts a harrowing confrontation with a former paramilitary who participated in the Nakba of 1948. The conversation cracks open buried grief and fury, bringing history violently into the present.
Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning—a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.
Advance Praise
“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
“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
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781487013974 |
| PRICE | $21.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 224 |