Leila and Khaled

By Nyla Matuk

A story of Palestinians--one raised in exile, the other rooted on the land--searching for a language of love amid the ruins of dispossession.

Leila, a Palestinian Canadian film scholar, joins a delegation of academics on her first journey to Occupied Palestine. What begins as an intellectual pilgrimage becomes an intimate, destabilizing return to an ancestral land her family was exiled from. There, she meets Khaled--a younger Palestinian man who pulls her into a mesmeric trance of desire, curiosity, and confrontation. Their brief charged affair unfolds in a landscape shaped by rupture and resistance, each of them bearing different inheritances of the same loss.

One night in Khaled's hotel room, Leila listens as he recounts a harrowing confrontation with a former paramilitary who participated in the Nakba of 1948. The conversation cracks open buried grief and fury, bringing history violently into the present.

Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning--a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1487013973
• ISBN13: 9781487013974
• Release Date: August 2026
• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Length: 224 Pages