Unsettling and beautifully written, The Book of Disappearance was originally published in 2014. It is built around questions such as: what if all the Palestinians in Israel disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react?

Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland after the Nakba. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of their collective disappearance. That search, and Ariel’s reactions to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.

The Book of Disappearance won several prizes in Arabic and was also longlisted for the International Booker Prize, “Speculative and haunting, this is an exceptional exercise in memory-making and psycho-geography".

Let's explore one crucial contemporary Arabic novel. We will discuss Azem’s urgent thematic choice, the violence embedded in her speculative plot, and her mastery in the description of places and people, as well as some of the translation choices made by Antoon.

Contact the host of In Translation: A Book Club - Arabic Session, Parra's Lit!