Leila and Khaled: A Novel

A decolonial vacation romance between two Palestinians – one raised in exile, the other rooted on the land – searching for home in each other. Two Palestinians search 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. Leila and Khaled is a love story and a reckoning—a lyrical, unflinching meditation on belonging, memory, and the enduring wounds of colonialism.