The Man Who Read Books by Rachid Benzine, Sam Taylor (Translator)

About: A young French photographer travels to Palestine to report on the bombings in the Gaza Strip. One morning, during a ceasefire, he wanders far from his hotel into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across a bookseller sitting on the doorstop of his shop—an old man, surrounded by stacks of books. As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller calls out to him and asks him to listen to his story, not simply take his picture.

The story that unfolds is one that encompasses exile and imprisonment, activism and political disillusionment, the joys of love and art and watching your children grow up and thrive, and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. Each event is tied to the book that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive it, from Milan Kundera to Frantz Fanon, to Umberto Eco, to Ernest Hemingway, among many others. There's a saying that when an old man dies a library burns, and it's this very library that the bookseller opens and describes.