Excerpt: The Tunnel by Gail Chehab

Title: The Tunnel
Author: Gail Chehab
 
Excerpt: The Tunnel by Gail Chehab www.WritersAndAuthors.info

Exceprt: 
Would a thousand naked virgins be waiting in heaven for him? Did he dream of death? No, he was not that type of Palestinian. He was Abu Khaled, doting father to Hanan and Khaled, and faithful husband to Fatha. To everyone else in Gaza, he was short and squat, but commanded the respect of a much taller man. It also did not hurt that he owned a tunnel. With the land, air, and sea blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel and Egypt, Omar’s tunnel was secretly buried deep in between the two countries. Each rocket squeezed Gaza’s borders tighter and filled Omar’s tunnel. Motorbikes, Coca Cola, cement, TVs, even a goat were smuggled daily from Egypt to Gaza through Omar’s tunnel.  If you didn’t have money for the merchandise floating through his tunnel, then you were like all the other paupers who begged and groveled from the UN. Frustration over inflated prices hadn’t caused protests and revolutions across the Middle East, but the seeds were being planted. Among the concrete high rises and the verdant olive trees, Gaza was an angry, yet hopeful city, mixed with chaos and dirt.

THE STORY: Set in Gaza before the historic events of what will become known to history as the ‘Arab Spring’, THE TUNNEL takes us on a journey into the life of Omar Hamdan, a Palestinian and doting family man. Skirting the Israeli-imposed embargo in the Occupied Territories, Omar transports black market goods from Egypt to Gaza through his tunnel. However, complications arise for Omar and his family when his daughter, Hanan, is diagnosed with leukaemia. Hanan is in urgent need of a bone marrow transplant, but treatment is impossible in Gaza. Refusing to give up hope, Omar, his daughter and family travel back and forth through his tunnel for treatment in Egypt. Yet, each time they do so, they run the risk of getting caught. And time for Omar and his family is fast running out…

Excerpt: The Tunnel by Gail Chehab www.WritersAndAuthors.info
BIO: Gail Chehab was born and raised in a small town nestled in the Hudson Valley just north of New York City. On the birth of her first child, Gail took her first creative writing course at a local college in California. During the ten-week course, Gail began writing her first novel, 'The Echo of Sand', which won the First Series Award for the Novel at Mid-List Press. THE TUNNEL is to be Gail's second published work. To learn more about Gail Chehab, visit:

AUTHOR WEBSITE: http://gailchehab.com/

AWARDS: THE TUNNEL was awarded Second Place in the Roanoke Review‘s Annual Fiction Contest and was a Top Finalist for the Arthur Edelstein Prize. THE TUNNEL was also a Semi-Finalist for the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Competition, Salem College’s International Literary Awards, and for The Ruth Hindman Foundation and the University of Alabama. In addition, the Summer Literary Seminars in Lithuania and Kenya awarded Gail a fellowship for THE TUNNEL.


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