In 1993, Amira Hass, an Israeli woman reporter, drove to Gaza to cover a story - and stayed for four years. Hass was the first journalist to live in the grim Palestinian enclave, so feared and despised by many Israelis that in the local idiom, "Go to Gaza" is another way to say "Go to hell.".

Drinking the Sea at Gaza maps the zones of ordinary Palestinian life. Hass gives voice to Gaza's doctors and housewives, its taxi drivers, farmers, and Islamic leaders. From her friends, she learns the secrets of slipping across sealed borders and stealing through night streets emptied by curfews. She shares Gaza's early euphoria over the Oslo negotiations and its subsequent despair as hope gives way to unrelenting hardship.

But even as Hass charts the griefs and humiliations of the Palestinians, she offers a remarkable portrait of a people not brutalized but eloquent, spiritually resilient, bleakly funny, and morally courageous.