The book describes the author's quest to get to the bottom of what happened in Khan Yunis and in Rafah in Gaza in November 1956.

[2] Sacco bases his book on conversations with Palestinians in Rafah and the neighbouring town of Khan Younis, and interweaves the events of 1956 with the events in Rafah at the time of the interviews—the bulldozing of homes, the death of Rachel Corrie and the reactions to the outbreak of the Iraq War.

He shows how much that is crucial to our lives a book can hold"[3] Rachel Cooke called it "truly unique" in "combining as it does oral history, memoir and reportage with cartoons in a way that, when he started out, most people – himself included, at times – considered utterly preposterous.

His newest undertaking is a bracing quest to uncover the truth about what happened in two Gaza Strip towns in 1956. .

Sacco’s art is alternately epic and intimate, but it’s his exacting and harrowing interviews that make this book an invaluable and wrenching piece of journalism.