'Like an affidavit in its egalitarian specificity-every detail of every character’s action is accounted for, and therefore scrutinized. Shibli crafts a story that connects strangers to one another through the occupation that has shaped their lives. Nerve-racking and eye-opening. She also, crucially, transcends the damage they have done. In the act of writing such an evocative, tightly wrought fiction, in her invention of such a complex, fighting character who is at once the victim’s double and the author’s stand-in, Shibli not only reflects the deadening conditions of occupation. The extreme economies of Shibli's style-blending aphorism and enigma, dry humor and searing critique-recall the novellas of César Aira and Mario Bellatin.

Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.Īn explosive double-telling of a single crime story. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people

Minor detail novel