There is a certain kind of nonfiction one can only really access in a novel. Isabella Hammad’s The Parisian, a debut novel that lives up to its ambitions, belongs in that category. Hammad, born in London to a British mother and Palestinian father, uses the historical novel partly as an inquiry into the fragmented nature of Palestinian identity.

The story is of the coming of age of Midhat Kamal, the son of a successful Nablus merchant who, as the clouds of the First World War gather, heads to Montpellier, France, to study medicine. From the beginning, the question of what exactly Midhat is confronts the young Nabulsi. At a wedding, a friend of his host family gives Midhat a cartoonish greeting, “Le jeune Turc!” “Actually,” corrects his host’s daughter, Jeannette, with whom Midhat would soon fall in love, “Monsieur Midhat would call himself a Palestinian Arab.” Midhat can’t help but contrast everything he sees and feels in France to what Nablus has pressed into him.