Minor Detail
Adania Shibli | Paperback | May 2020
Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
- Winner, LiBeraturpreis, Germany, 2023
- Shortlisted, Translated Literature, National Book Awards, United States, 2020
- Longlisted, International Booker Prize, United Kingdom, 2021
- Longlisted, Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, United Kingdom, 2021
Minor Detail revolves around a brutal crime committed one year after the War of 1948, which Palestinians mourn as the Nakba, the catastrophe that led to the displacement, exile, and refugeedom of more than 700,000 people, and which Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence.
Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah reads about this ‘minor detail’ in a larger context, and becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession.
In this compelling novel, Shibli’s haunting prose is a form of resistance in itself.
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Author Info
Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974, holds a PhD from the University of East London, and has published three novels in Arabic. She teaches at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University in Palestine and divides her time between Jerusalem and Berlin.
About the translator
Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic, whose work includes Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue, Rania Mamoun’s Thirteen Months of Sunrise, and Dima Wannous’s The Frightened Ones. Her translations have been nominated for the Best Translated Book Award and TA First Translation Prize, and supported by the Jan Michalski Foundation, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, and several English PEN Translates Awards. She is also executive director of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA).
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