Upside-Down Love: A Memoir in Two Voices

In her heartfelt debut, Israeli American human rights lawyer Bashi recounts how she met and built a family with her Palestinian spouse. Bashi’s father was an Iraqi Jew who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s. He viewed all Arabs with distrust, whereas Bashi, in 2005, founded Gisha, an organization that offered legal assistance to Palestinians who needed military permits to access work or family members outside of Gaza. It was through that work that Bashi first met her husband, Osama (a pseudonym), who sought permission to study in London in 2006. “We knew what we longed for was forbidden, that it could never happen,” Bashi writes of their instant attraction. They married anyway, and started a life in the West Bank, enduring painful experiences including the premature birth of their second child, whom Osama was barred from seeing in the Tel Aviv hospital where she was born. Bashi resists hyperbole, acknowledging that “Osama and I haven’t changed the world with our choices.... but we managed to build a good life together, amidst the oppression and attempts to instill fear.” This intimate real-life love story brings welcome humanity to a fraught subject. Agent: Andy Ross, Andy Ross Agency. (Jan.)