Over the summer of 2011, in her eightieth year, Dervla Murphy spent a month in the Gaza Strip. She met liberals and Islamists, Hamas and Fatah supporters, rich and poor. Used to western reporters dashing in and out of the Strip in times of crisis, the people she met were touched by her genuine, unflinching interest and opened their hearts to her. What she finds are a people who, far from the story we are so often fed, overwhelmingly long for peace and an end to the violence that has so grossly distorted their lives. The impression we take away from the book is of a people whose real, complex, nuanced voice has never been heard before.

‘Her book is a kind of wake-up call to the world.’ - Colm Tóibín

‘A Month By the Sea is a restless antidote to the easy road of indifference ... a fist-clenched polemic, an octogenarian waving magnificently, not drowning.’- TLS