In this novel, Sahar Khalifeh examines the stark realities in the lives of Palestinian women. Through her protagonist, Zeynab, born to an American mother and a Palestinian father, Khalifeh illuminates the disorienting experience of living between two worlds, and the search for identity that mirrors the Palestinians' own quest for nationhoood. Set against the emotionally charged background of the early 1990s - when the Gulf War and the Oslo Accords fundamentally shifted the political landscape - The Inheritance takes as its subject the fate of young Palestinian women who supported their families for decades working elsewhere in the Middle East. Khalifeh traces the disruption caused by the Gulf War on the life of these women, as Zeynab returns to her homeland and tries to adapt to her new life on the West Bank after years spent in Kuwait.