No memoir of life as a diaspora Palestinian has been as personal and intimate as Ghada Karmi's. Taking the reader through her childhood in Palestine, her flight to Britain after the catastrophe of 1948, and her coming of age in the coffee bars of Golders Green - the middle-class Jewish quarter in North London - Karmi reminds us of the adversities faced by those born in Palestine and, in tracing out her life beyond Palestinian borders, hints at the hardships that continue to plague those that remained in her mother country. Yet it is with a gentle humor that she describes the bizarre and sometimes tense realities that mask her life in “Little Tel Aviv” and, later, her struggle, like that of many other women in the late-fifties, to get a university grant to study medicine. Karmi's straightforward yet poignant tone is a revelatory glance into the Palestinian exile experience.<br />