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.

About the author

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and later to the US. She works as a senior correspondent for the Arabic newspaper, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, in New York. She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her first short story collection, City of Strangers, is forthcoming in Arabic in the summer of 2025. The Book of Disappearance has been translated into English, Italian, and German, and is forthcoming in Portuguese and Polish.

About the translator

Antoon holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard, where he specialised in Arabic literature. He has published five novels and two poetry collections. His most recent work is Postcards from the Underworld (Seagull, 2023). His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. He is an associate professor at New York University.

Sinan Antoon on his translation: “I choose works that I find exceptionally powerful and haunting and that I feel must be shared. I read The Book of Disappearance once Ibtisam finished writing it when it was still an unpublished manuscript in Arabic. I was stunned by its beauty and told her that I wanted to translate it as soon as I had the time”.

About the facilitator

Oula Ghannoum, Professor of Plant Biology at Western Sydney University, bridges science and art. An expert on photosynthesis, she leads a multidisciplinary team addressing food security under climate change. Drawn to Sufism, Oula is a passionate poet and storyteller in Arabic and English. She co-edited a bilingual anthology on Arab Australian women migration (Don’t ask the Trees for their Names) and is working on a project weaving memory and truth telling.

Contact the host of In Translation: A Book Club / Arabic Session in Liverpool