Palestinian walks (2007)

Six walks in the hills of the West Bank, spanning twenty-six years, by Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian human rights lawyer and writer who has lived there since his family fled Jaffa in 1948. Rather than explain the conflict through politics first, it lets the reader watch a loved landscape change over the decades. That is what makes it so effective for anyone who struggles to picture the occupation as daily life rather than headlines. It won the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008, and it is short and quiet enough to read in a weekend.