Literature
Therese Chehade
We Walked On
Set during Lebanon’s civil war, We Walked On immerses readers in the landscape of war, weaving political unrest into everyday life. With Rita, a fourteen-year-old girl, and Hisham, her thirty-year-old Arabic teacher, Chehade has created two richly drawn characters who counter violence with the redemptive power of books and human connection and find authentic hope in untenable circumstances. We Walked On is a timely novel about what it’s like to live in a war zone, how war corrupts our moral sense, and how to survive and endure in an unjust world.
Thérèse Soukar Chehade grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, and was a teenager during the Lebanese civil war. She moved to the United States in 1983, where she earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Her first novel, Loom, won the 2011 Arab American Book Award for fiction. We Walked On won the 2025 Arab American Book Award for fiction. She lives in western Massachusetts.