Paperback review: A Month by the sea: Encounters in Gaza, by Dervla Murphy: The battle-scarred Gaza Strip Getty

Eland - £12.99

Rabah Abu Shanab, 47, in the ruins of his house in Shejaiya (Sam Masters)

Dervla Murphy doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and that includes her readers. While she’s happy to oblige and explain something of the recent history of the Gaza Strip, she simplifies nothing, preferring instead to demonstrate the painful mess that humans have created here. Murphy makes a trip to Gaza in 2011 when a window briefly opens after President Hosni Mubarak is deposed. She is for ever intrepid: not for her those comfortable hotels where the UN officials stay during negotiations in Gaza. She stays with local families, drinks tea in local shops, persuades local guides to take her places foreigners aren’t usually allowed.

What she illuminates so well is the complexities and contradictions of life in Gaza. The wealth that some Palestinians who live there have, despite the bombings and the lack of amenities. The feminists who rail against arranged marriage and the veil. The mothers who seem proud of their sons who have been killed by the Israelis.

What she also comes across most often, she says, is resilience and courage. Most of the families she meets on her own (not when guided to them) want simply to get on with their lives, get jobs, provide for their families.

Balanced with the personal is always, for Murphy, the political, and this is less travel account than it is angry polemic against an overwhelming force. Interspersed with stories about the people she meets are historical accounts, UN statistics, a howl at Tony Blair, journalistic op eds. It can be hard to keep pace sometimes with this 80-year-old grandmother, nimble and ferocious and committed to her investigation of life in Gaza as she is. But the effort is well worth it. Utterly essential reading.