The latest addition to my website is Adania Shibli‘s وسفر الاختفاءتفصيل ثانوي (Minor Detail). This book has been in the news recently (October 2023) as Shibli and her book were cancelled at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The book is divided into two parts. The first is set in rhe Negev Desert, close to the Egyptian border. In 1949. An Israeli troop is sent to guard the border. They come across some wandering (and unarmed) Bedouins. They kill the camels and the Bedouins, except for a girl. They capture her and then gang-rape her and kill her. Some fifty plus years later, a Palestinian woman comes across the story, reported by an Israeli journalist, and is intrigued as much by the fact that the event took place exactly twenty-five years to the day before the date of her birth rather than by the actual murders: there was nothing really unusual about the main details, especially when compared with what happens daily in a place dominated by the roar of occupation and ceaseless killing. She decides to investigate further and hires a car to go the area (illegally) and see what happened and witnesses many aspects of the Israeli occupation the Palestinians face. It is a superb novel about the horrors Palestinians face under Israeli occupation.