The novel tells the story of Hayat, a young survivor of the 1948 massacre in Deir Yassin, a small village near Jerusalem. Twenty years later, that girl-turned-witness talks again about fear, memory and past events. Hayat tells the story of a girl whom, just as she is discovering the world, tragedy turns into a witness, in living memory of her family, her neighbours and a people that witnessed the violence that preceded the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, an event that the Palestinian people knows as the Nakba, the 'catastrophe'.