Blah Blah Book Club: October 2026 meetup

This month, we will be reading and discussing Cactus Pear for my Beloved by Samar Sabawi, shortlisted for the 2025 Stella Prize, from our Australian Contemporary category.

BLURB. The story of a family over the past 100 years, starting in Palestine under British rule and ending in Redland Bay in Queensland. Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear for my Beloved blends memoir and fictionalized elements to share the story of her parents and many like them, who were born as their own parents were being forced to leave their homelands.

Filled with love for land, history, and peoples it is more than anything else a family story and a love story told with enormous humanity and feeling. How the son (one of six), born at the height of the displacements to a disabled father and illiterate mother, a believer in peaceful resistance, became a leading poet and writer in Palestine, before being forced, with his own young family in tow, to flee and start a new life in Australia. (336 pages)

Happy reading!