Minor Detail (sob consulta)

Adania Shibli

Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize | Shortlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature

Published 6 May 2020 | French paperback with flaps, 120 pages

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

‘An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion and formal virtuosity.’

— Pankaj Mishra, author of The Age of Anger