Join author and journalist Ibtisam Azem and Tara Tobler for the Sheffield launch of Azem’s novel The Book of Disappearance (tr. Sinan Antoon), an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.
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. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv – café patrons, radio commentators, flower-cutters – against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.
Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is a story where memory and tense have the power to change everything.
‘...a book of prophecy. A book of reckoning. A book of gut-wrenching monstrosities & of profound tenderness. In this study of grief & love, state violence & wild self-delusions, Azem fearlessly looks into the void...a heart-breaking, awe-inspiring, genre-defying achievement...’ PRETI TANEJA, author of AFTERMATH
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. She lived in Jerusalem and studied at the Hebrew University before moving to Germany and later to the US. She has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her first short story collection, I Wish I Were a Hoopoe, is forthcoming in Arabic in the summer of 2024. The Book of Disappearance has been translated into English, Italian, and German.
Tara Tobler is the senior fiction editor at And Other Stories, where her authors include Mona Arshi, Tanya Tagaq, Morgan Talty, Preti Taneja, Manya Wilkinson, and Alexis Wright. She's also a writer, a critic, an aspiring bead artist, and mum to three young children. She lives in Edale.