Delusion

From the singular talent that brought readers up close to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and its affiliated cruelties in Minor Detail comes an equally searing novel following the intertwined lives of two unnamed Palestinians.

Adania Shibli is the master of the slow boil, the tension-building and sense of apocalypse in the quotidian that so distinctly define her portraits of Palestinian existence. In her evocatively conjured landscapes of sand, rubble, and orange and olive groves, animals are not to be trusted―birds and chameleons are informants―and winds are the harbingers of police raids.

With this signature style of kaleidescoping in and out on details ranging from the vast to the microscopic, Shibli turns her unfaltering gaze once again to the injustices of Israeli apartheid, this time tracing the fates of two Palestinian students overlapping in school but differing in fortune and trajectory. The boy, the son of a falafel shop owner, is imprisoned for four years as a teenager after graffitiing anti-occupation slogans on a busy street; the girl, meanwhile, dabbles in resistance by graffitiing her own slogans that are quickly painted over and that inspire no collective action, before she graduates from high school and matriculates to an Israeli university.

As the two lives wend onwards, transforming girl to student to employee to interpreter, boy to shopworker to cleaner to craftsman, the constant across their two existences is the hovering presence of Israeli surveillance, experienced in the daily detentions of bus riders on their way to work, disappearances of student activists, and messages forced onto scraps of paper then swallowed. Unchanging, too, is both the power and danger of language: swallowed messages molded into capsules promise both connection and resistance between prisoners and their families, and accents are proof of storied generational pasts in Russia and the U.S., but so, too, are mispronounced "r"s the signifiers of outsider status and misplaced verbs the fuel of ridicule from students and IDF soldiers.

With the uncanny precision that has become her critically-acclaimed hallmark, Shibli creates not just a snapshot of Palestine, its moments large and small of injustice and resistance, but also a portrait of love and very human existence, of the unparalleled comfort of the familiar, from an accent to a fruit, and the dignity that is lost when humans are prohibited from sharing in such familiarity.