INCLUDED IN THE BEST OF GRANTA SERIES: A profoundly moving and candid memoir about being a Palestinian in exile, from one of the most important writers and thinkers of the twentieth century, with an introduction by Hisham Matar

Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This account of his early life reveals how it influenced his books Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and brought up in Cairo, spending every summer in the Lebanese mountain village of Dhour el Shweir, until he was 'banished' to America in 1951. This work is a mixture of emotional archaeology and memory, exploring an essentially irrecoverable past. As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this personal memoir of his ferociously demanding 'Victorian' father and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother. Now with a new introduction by Hisham Matar.

"Said is capable of writing like a gifted novelist, like a Palestinian Proust" - Independent on Sunday

"Out of Place recreates the sights and sounds, the smells and shouts, of a lost world, as Gunter Grass did for Danzig or Joyce for turn-of-the-century Dublin ... One of the greatest cities of our age has produced a work of art, one of the noblest autobiographies of our time" - Irish Times

"A fine elegy and a scrupulous reckoning with the past" - Daily Telegraph