Minor Detail
Adania Shibli
A rape and murder in the Negev in 1949, and a woman in present-day Ramallah who cannot let it go — a novel of devastating formal precision.
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
The edition
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Connected in the archive
20 connected records20 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Ramallahرام الله
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: 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.
on a related subject — 19 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Gate of the Sun
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "novel", "nakba", "memory".
- Mornings in Jenin
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Shared tags: "novel", "nakba".
- A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Acreعكا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "nakba".
- Apeirogon
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Shared tag: "novel".
- and 13 more
Cite this page
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- Chicago
“Minor Detail.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/library/minor-detail/.- MLA
“Minor Detail.” Library, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/library/minor-detail/. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-minor-detail, title = {Minor Detail}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/library/minor-detail/}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }