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What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem's powerfully imaginative novel and we could not be more delighted to welcome her to Edinburgh to unpack these questions and this extraordinary book.Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, Ibtisam Azem's The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine as it grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory.
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The book:
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.
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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. 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.
Azem holds an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with minors in German and English Literature from Freiburg University, as well as an MA in Social Work from NYU.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
43-45 West Nicolson Street, EH8 9DB Edinburgh, United Kingdom, 43-45 West Nicolson Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9, United Kingdom,Edinburgh, United Kingdom
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