One morning, during a ceasefire in Gaza, a young photographer wanders far from his hotel and into the narrow alleys of the city. Roaming aimlessly, he stumbles across an old man, surrounded by stacks of books. As the photographer raises his camera, the bookseller asks him to listen to his story first. ‘For isn’t there a story behind every gaze? The story of a life. Sometimes of an entire nation.’

The story that unfolds encompasses exile and imprisonment, resistance and political disillusionment, the joy of watching your children grow up and the tragedies that tear your loved ones from you. They say that when an old man dies a library burns. Day after day, the photographer returns. Year after year, Nabil shares the books that helped him understand and, in some cases, survive these events – from the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Mourid Barghouti to Gabriel García Márquez, Frantz Fanon and Ernest Hemingway.

The Man Who Read Books is a magnificent modern story of the power of words against barbarism, of books as bastions of resistance against the loss of empathy, of literature as a means of sustenance during our darkest hours.