Minor Detail
by Adania Shibli
Book of the Month
JUNE 2021

BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH selection JUNE 2021:

For our June selection, we have picked Minor Detail, and will be donating €2 from each sale to the Go Fund Me page helping to rebuild the Samir Mansour Book Store in Gaza, destroyed in recent airstrikes.

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‘Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit—a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers–it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma … For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue duree of ennui and isolation rather than a dramatic moment of crisis.’
— New York Review of Books

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba – the catastrophe that led to the displacement and expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Times Books of the Year 2020