David N. Myers in the LARB:
ON A COLD February morning in 2012, marked by driving rain and high winds, a terrible collision occurred on a road outside Jerusalem. The accident was caused by an irresponsible and undertrained semitrailer truck driver with 25 prior traffic violations who lost control of his vehicle, which flipped over and swung into a bus carrying school-age children. The crash produced a huge conflagration that would consume the bus, leaving many children burned and six of them dead, along with a teacher.
It is this tragic event that stands at the center of Nathan Thrall’s book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023), which is based on an extraordinary article in The New York Review of Books in 2021. And it offers a whole microcosmic world of Palestinians (and a few Israelis)—the list of characters at the beginning of the book numbers more than 60—whose lives intersected on that bitter morning in February. Thrall meticulously reconstructs their worlds, exposing readers to deep class and family differences, rivalries between clans and towns, painfully unrequited love, conventional and unconventional gender roles, and, above all, searing tragedy.
More here.