A sweeping narrative of the Naqba—the Palestinian word for the catastrophe, in 1948, in which they were uprooted from their lands and forced to settle in refugee camps, which are still brimming with the dispossessed and the stories integral not only to their identity as a people but also to their survival. The Lebanese writer Elias Khoury collected such stories in his work for the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, and wove them into an epic tale of loss—of a loved one, a house, a village, an olive grove. “Back to the beginning,” he writes—and his returns are heartbreakingly beautiful.