The Book of Disappearance
Ibtisam Azem | Paperback | April 2025
Translated by Sinan Antoon
Longlisted, International Booker Prize, United Kingdom, 2025
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day?
The Book of Disappearance is set in contemporary Tel Aviv. Alaa is a young Palestinian man who is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. His Jewish neighbour and friend, Ariel, is a journalist who believes in Israel’s national myth but is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. He begins to search for clues about why Alaa and the Palestinians have vanished. Their stories, and the stories of the ordinary people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
Ibtisam Azem’s spare and evocative novel 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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Author Info
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 the 1948 Nakba. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and later to the US. Azem has published two novels in Arabic: The Sleep Thief (2011) and The Book of Disappearance (2014). Her first short story collection, City of Strangers, is forthcoming in Arabic in the summer of 2025.
About the translator:
Sinan Antoon is an Iraqi poet, novelist, translator, and scholar. He has published two collections of poetry and five novels in Arabic. His self-translation of his second novel, The Corpse Washer, won the 2013 Arab American Book Prize, and his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators Association Award. He is co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and associate professor of Arabic literature at New York University.
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