In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees

•In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees provides a fresh look on a misunderstood people, and a different perspective on Israel and the Palestinian diaspora. •This is the first novel set in Gaza on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict written by an English speaking writer.•It is about an American who discovers himself as a person in the middle of a refugee camp where animals can talk and dream. •On his second trip to Gaza in 1993, he saw two Palestinian boys playing with an injured bird with a string around its neck. The boys would toss the bird into the air and the bird would fly a few feet before the string ran out and the bird would fall into the boy’s hands. When he saw this, the idea that this story would be much better served told as fiction rather than journalism came to him. For nearly a year, the author carried this image of the bird on the string with him and then one day he wrote a short story about a bird on a string and it was his first published piece of fiction. This haunting experience was the impetus for turning Talarigo away from journalism into fiction.