The Hollow Half Audiobook By Sarah Aziza cover art

The Hollow Half

A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

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The Hollow Half

By: Sarah Aziza
Narrated by: Sarah Aziza
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About this listen

A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back.

“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

©2025 Sarah Aziza (P)2025 Dreamscape Media
Eating Disorders Emigration & Immigration Mental Health Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Social Sciences Women Memoir Middle East Haunted
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After listening to this wonderful and educational book, if you do not sympathize and support the Palestinians and their cause, I’m sorry you are heartless.

Truthful and beautiful!

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Well written, but the book got WAY too political and exhausting- i felt like i was on an endurance march-couldn’t finish it

way too political

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“Memoir” seems like an overstatement. The author feels detached from the reader, holds you at arms length. Filled with academic ponderings, not balanced well by concrete details of her life. I found the prose style over-labored. Often, multiple and mixed metaphors were used to describe one thing. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Tedious

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