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The Book of Disappearance
Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize
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Brief Description
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? The Book of Disappearance is set in contemporary Tel Aviv. Alaa is a young Palestinian man who is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland....
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See moreLonglisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, this critically acclaimed Arabic novel invites English readers into the complex lives of Palestinians living in Israel.
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Description
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day?
The Book of Disappearance is set in contemporary Tel Aviv. Alaa is a young Palestinian man who is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. His Jewish neighbour and friend, Ariel, is a journalist who believes in Israel’s national myth but is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He begins to search for clues about why Alaa and the Palestinians have vanished. Their stories, and the stories of the ordinary people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
Ibtisam Azem’s spare and evocative novel is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781923058620
Publisher: Text Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 04 April 2025
Country: Australia
Imprint: The Text Publishing Company
Contributors:
- Translated by Sinan Antoon
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 153.0mm
Height: 234.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 240
About the Author
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in the 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and later to the US. Azem has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her first short story collection, City of Strangers, is forthcoming in Arabic in the summer of 2025.
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The Book of Disappearance
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, forty-eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbours have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators. Alaa, a young Palestinian man, converses with his dead...Paperback$5400Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks
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