Minor Detail

A meditation on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people

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.

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.


Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic and Executive Director of the American Literary Translators Association.

‘Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman – to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.’ J. M. Coetzee

‘Adania’s writing emerges urgently without ever neglecting the poetry in the mundane. That’s Adania Shibli: subtle yet alarming, quiet and effective; profound, playful, and potent.’ Lit Hub