Author(s): Adania Shibli

Fiction | Staff Picks

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 exile of some 700,000 people--and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.  

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Reviewed by Fantine:

Israeli soldiers commit a horrific war crime and decades later a Palestinian woman comes across it, taken aback by a minor detail she can't shake. Like a mirage, history shimmers within reach as the land holds horrors that cannot be bulldozed into oblivion like villages on an Israeli map. Harrowing and haunting, small revelations build unstoppable momentum and tension as time seems to fold in on itself. Incredibly well-crafted, I had a physical reaction to the final page. A necessary and valuable read.