Sahar Mustafah

Sahar Mustafah is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, a richly complex inheritance she explores in her fiction. Her debut novel The Beauty of Your Face was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2020. Her short stories have been awarded the Guild Literary Complex Prize for fiction, a Distinguished Story honor from Best American Short Stories, three Pushcart Prize nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination, among other honors. Her story anthology Code of the West was published in 2017 by Willow Books. She is a member of Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), as well as a 2015 Voices of Our Nation fellow (VONA). Sahar also served with Voices of Protest, an artist collaboration begun by Chicago's Guild Literary Complex which seeks to promote the work of exiled writers and artists worldwide through the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). She currently writes and teaches in Chicago.

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The Beauty of Your Face

A Palestinian American woman wrestles with faith, loss, and identity before coming face-to-face with a school shooter in this searing debut.

“The Beauty of Your Face is a striking and stirring debut, one that reaches its hands straight into the fire. Sahar Mustafah writes with wisdom and grace about the unthinkable, the unspeakable, and the unspoken.” 

—Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize finalist for The Great Believers 

(W. W. Norton, April 2020)

The Slightest Green

In the middle of dinner one evening, Intisar Jaber receives a phone call that will upend her quiet life in Chicago: her father is dying and she must go to Palestine to pay her final respects. But Intisar hasn't seen or heard from Hafez for nearly two decades, ever since he abandoned her and her mother to join the resistance.

After a fateful mission, Hafez was thrown into the notorious Gahana Prison to serve a life sentence—permanently removed from her life. As soon as Intisar arrives in his village of Bayt al-Hawa, she discovers what it means to be a stranger in her ancestral land, the inheritance of loss, and the high price of freedom.

Meanwhile, Hafez’s mother Sundus battles to save the home that she built with her husband from thieving hands. Will Intisar, her estranged granddaughter, help Sundus fight to reclaim it? Can they close the gaping distance between them before it’s too late?

Powerfully etched in Sahar Mustafah’s honest and lyrical prose, The Slightest Green explores the place—and people—we call home and how far we will go to reach them.

(Interlink Books, November 2025)