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No One Knows Their Blood Type is a novel of identity, belonging, and conflicting truths—of stories, secrets, songs, rumors, and lies. On the day that her father dies, Jumana makes a discovery about her blood type. Hers could not have been inherited from her father—the father she sometimes longed for, but always despised. This extraordinary novel of Palestine centers its narrative not on the battlefield of history, but on how women live every day and the colonial context of their embodied lives. With humor and exhilarating inventiveness, it asks: why aren’t questions of love, friendship, parenthood, and desire at the core of our conversations about liberty and freedom? How would this transform our ideas of resistance?

Praise for No One Knows Their Blood Type:

“There’s a remarkable coiled power to this slim novel—it moves in unexpected directions, its characters’ lives tossed about by the collision of history and personality.” —Kamila Shamsie

“No One Knows Their Blood Type offers a gripping, textured vision of what it can feel like to be human amidst colonial dehumanization. I loved this tender, troubling book.” —Katherine Beutner

“No One Knows Their Blood Type rejects the impulse to hyper-explain Palestinian life, instead taking the reader into the inner lives of characters shaped by the exile and instability that have come to define the Palestinian condition… The masterful English translation is a triumph of language over trauma. Through and through, this is a story told by Palestinians, for Palestinians.” —Eman Abdelhadi

Bios:

Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She edited The Book of Ramallah, an anthology of short stories published by Comma Press in 2021. An English translation of her poetry appeared from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hazem Jamjoum is a cultural historian completing his doctorate at NYU, and an audio curator and archivist at the British Library.