Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Bookseller review by Harry:

“An electric novel that took my breath away about how we deal with historic trauma, abuse, and what we lose in the violence of archives and history. Split between 1949 – a year of Palestinian mourning after the Nakba which saw 750,000+ Palestinians violently displaced and occupied by Israeli siege, with their culture and history destroyed in the process- and some time in the recent past, Shibli captures an Israeli atrocity in one half and how this singular violence becomes expounded across generations in the second. Driven by an urge to know what is often left unsayable, undocumented and un-accounted for, the narrator in the second half shows life under Israeli control in breath-taking clarity. This is a work of stunning prose, honest and unflinching, and perspective, that shows how devastating life under occupation is, and how erasure frames a commonality of existence. A must read.”