Minor Detail

The first half of Minor Detail follows, in exact and dispassionate prose, an Israeli officer in the summer of 1949 whose unit, patrolling the Negev border, captures a young Palestinian Bedouin woman; she is raped, killed, and buried in the sand. The second half belongs to a woman in Ramallah decades later who reads a stray account of the crime — committed one year to the day before her birth — and becomes possessed by the need to recover this “minor detail” of history, crossing checkpoints and partitions to find the site.

Published in Arabic in 2017 and translated by Elisabeth Jaquette, the novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is a meditation on erasure: on how violence enters the record, and how it is made to vanish from it.

About the author

Adania Shibli, born in Palestine in 1974, is a novelist and essayist whose works include Touch and We Are All Equally Far from Love. She has twice received the A. M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer’s Award and lives between Berlin and Jerusalem.

Details

• Published in Arabic, 2017; English translation by Elisabeth Jaquette, Fitzcarraldo Editions and New Directions, 2020
• Shortlisted, National Book Award for Translated Literature; longlisted, International Booker Prize