Time selects Eli Sharabi captivity memoir for 100 must-read books of 2025

It is the first published memoir of a freed Hamas captive and has become a bestseller in Hebrew.

By JNS

Time Magazine included the memoir of former Israeli captive Eli Sharabi, titled “Hostage,” on its list of 100 “must-read” books of 2025, published Wednesday.

Ahead of the book’s international release on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks, Time ran a long-form piece with translated excerpts from the memoir, which it called “a taut, immersive chronicle of endurance” that “also serves as a window into the Israeli view of the war.”

Sharabi “was pulled away from his wife and two daughters in the first hours of the [Oct. 7, 2023,] attack. For the next 491 days, with rare exceptions, the only people Sharabi saw were other hostages and Hamas militants—the same parties that have remained front and center in the viewfinder of Jewish Israelis for two solid years, even as most of the world shifted its focus to the Palestinian civilians,” the article states.

“Hostage” was published in Israel in May, four months after the abductee’s return from Gaza.

It is the first published memoir of a freed Hamas captive and has become a bestseller in Hebrew.

The English edition is published by Harper Influence, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

“It was important to me that the story come out as quickly as possible so that the world will understand what life is like inside captivity,” said Sharabi, according to AP.

Sharabi, 53, who was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Be’eri on the border with Gaza, said he had no access to the news in captivity and only learned after his release that his wife and two daughters had been murdered on Oct. 7, 2023.

“I thought I was returning to my family,” he told Channel 12 News at the time. “I had no idea.”

Sharabi lost more than 66 pounds during his ordeal and weighed just 97 pounds upon his release on Feb. 8, 2025.