Out of Place is a record of an essentially lost or forgotten world, that of my early life. Several years ago I received what seemed to be a fatal medical diagnosis, and it therefore struck me as important to leave behind a subjective account of the life I have lived in the Arab world where I was born and spent my formative years... Many of the places and people I recall here no longer exist...'

Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, but spent much of his youth in Cairo and Lebanon. Out of Place is a moving act of emotional archaeology and memory, a record of an essentially irrecoverable past—Palestine is now Israel; Lebanon was transformed by twenty years of civil war; and colonial, monarchical Egypt disappeared in 1952. Arab but Christian, Palestinian but the holder of a US passport, Said’s sense of himself as an outsider was exacerbated by never knowing whether Arabic or English was his first language, and by having an improbably British first name yoked to an Arabic surname.

As ill health sets him thinking about endings, Edward Said returns to his beginnings in this intensely personal memoir of his ferociously demanding ‘Victorian’ father, and his adored, inspiring, yet ambivalent mother. Out of Place is a story of displacement and exile, a narrative of departures, and a celebration of identity as something multiple, and fluid. It brings together the two disparate halves of Said’s experience as an American and as an Arab and traces how through his dissonant identity one of our most important intellectuals has been able to voice the otherwise silenced Palestinian experience of dispossession.

‘Out of Place is an intensely moving act of reclamation and understanding, a portrait of a transcultural and often painful upbringing written with wonderful vividness and unsparing honesty. To read it is to come to know his family and his younger self as closely as we know characters in literature, to be shown, intimately and unforgettably, what it has meant in the last half-century to be a Palestinian.’
—Salman Rushdie

‘Said is in place among the truly important intellectuals of our century. His examined life, from the tragic and triumphant perspective of a mortal illness, is superbly worth living. I know I shall not read a work to match this one this year, or for many years.’
—Nadine Gordimer