Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Man Who Read Books

The Man Who Read Books

Benzine, Rachid
Taylor, Sam

Hardcover

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $20.00

PREORDER - Expected ship date November 10, 2026

ISBN10: 1538781158
ISBN13: 9781538781159
Publisher: Cardinal
Published: Nov 10 2026
Pages: 144
Height: 0.61 Width: 5.75 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
An elderly bookseller improbably keeps his shop open in Palestine, telling a foreign correspondent the ways in which literature has provided him with refuge and inspiration.

An essential novel to remind us that those in Gaza continue to read, they continue to exist. -David Diop, author of Beyond the Door of No Return and At Night All Blood Is Black

A young French photographer travels to Palestine to report on the bombings in the Gaza Strip. One morning, during a ceasefire, he wanders far from his hotel into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across a bookseller sitting on the doorstop of his shop--an old man, surrounded by stacks of books. As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller calls out to him and asks him to listen to his story, not simply take his picture.

The story that unfolds is one that encompasses exile and imprisonment, activism and political disillusionment, the joys of love and art and watching your children grow up and thrive, and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. Each event is tied to the book that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive it, from Milan Kundera to Frantz Fanon to Umberto Eco to Ernest Hemingway, among many others.

There's a saying that when an old man dies a library burns, and it's this very library that the bookseller opens and describes. Rachid Benzine gives us a magnificent modern tale that explores the power of words against barbarism, of books as the last bastions of resistance against the loss of empathy, of literature as a means of sustenance during our darkest hours.

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