No Land to Stand On: Notes from Detention by Mahmoud Khalil (Hardcover) (PREORDER)

Nonfiction - Biography & Autobiography - Memoirs - Social Activists - Political Science - Civil Rights - Human Rights

RELEASE DATE: 9/29/2026 (WILL SHIP DIRECTLY FROM OUR SUPPLIER'S WAREHOUSE)

A revelatory and powerful testament of protest, courage, and imprisonment in America’s deportation regime

“Are you Mahmoud Khalil?” The question marked the start of a politically charged odyssey that took the Palestinian graduate student and legal resident from his pregnant wife and home in New York City, transported him across the country, and locked him up in a Louisiana detention camp under threat of deportation. His “crime”: exercising his right to free speech at Columbia University, where he emerged as a leading voice against the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. No Land to Stand On is his indelible account, the story of a man confronting the reality that he had become target number one for a lawless regime shredding basic rights.

Drawing on his prison diary and writing in vivid, page-turning detail, Mahmoud Khalil conjures the despair and cruelty of ICE detention, where prisoners can vanish overnight and visiting families risk their own deportation. There is humanity, too, in the men’s acts of care―their mutual help with documents, the prison cake they make after Mahmoud can only follow the birth of his son on the public payphone. In tandem, he tells the multi-generational story of a family expelled from Palestine to a Syrian refugee camp, of flight from Assad’s regime to Lebanon, of arrival in an America that promised permanence and protection, and of the enduring struggle for Palestine.

A work of courage and resistance, No Land to Stand On is a call to integrity, to staying true to one’s life’s mission, and to defending the inalienable right to safety, freedom, and a land to stand on.

AUTHOR BIO: 

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian born in a refugee camp in Syria. He fled Assad's Syria at the age of 18 and holds Algerian citizenship. He studied computer science at the Lebanese American University while working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, then served as programs manager at the British Embassy in Beirut. He moved to the United States in 2022 to attend Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, where he became a prominent figure during the student protests against the war on Gaza. Mahmoud lives in New York, where he continues to fight against the threat of deportation. No Land to Stand On is his first book.

Review Quotes:

"No Land to Stand On not only recounts, with chilling precision, an intimate experience of the free world's sinister new tyrannies, it also describes a longer and ongoing ordeal of exile and ostracism. And yet, while troubling our consciences, Mahmoud Khalil opens our minds and hearts with his dignity, compassion, and hopefulness. With its spiritual and intellectual power, his book is already a classic of dissident literature, a true peer of Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope and Eugenia Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind"
--Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza

"Khalil's clear-eyed analysis, the clarity of his prose, and the strength of his character turn his devastating story into an extraordinary book that everyone should read. It is as terrifying about injustice as it is inspiring about resistance."
--Kamila Shamsie, author of Best of Friends

"Through his vivid, urgent and beautifully written story, Mahmoud Khalil lays bare the systems of power that rob us of our freedoms--in Palestine, Syria, the United States and around the world. No Land to Stand On makes it crystal clear just how collective this struggle is. This book won't depress you--it'll light a fire under you."
--Mona Chalabi, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ten Lives

"At once achingly personal and politically urgent, No Land to Stand On explores how displacement reverberates across generations, offering a powerful testament to endurance in the face of forced statelessness."
--Hala Alyan, author of the Pulitzer Prize-finalist I'll Tell You When I'm Home

" No Land to Stand On tells the story of a brave and decent man, persecuted for opposing the genocide of his people by a government that practices sadism and deceit. It will be remembered as one of America's most important prison memoirs, a defining document of our age."
--Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

"A target of the Trump administration offers a memoir that is part prison narrative, part humanizing reclamation, part advocate's roar. . . . The author watches his notoriety build and comes to understand President Trump's personal investment in his case: ". . . I was an experiment, I realized. The government was testing what it could get away with. . . . If they succeeded with me, a permanent resident with no criminal history, imagine what they could do to others." A searing, uncompromising account of the deep, personal impacts of an unjust system."
--Kirkus