Minor Detail

Adania Shibli’s haunting meditation on war, violence & memory, cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession. 

In the summer of 1949, one year after 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from Israel during what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe, & Israelis call the War of Independence, a group of Israeli soldiers rape & murder a teenage Palestinian girl.  In the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah embarks on a journey of discovery into the events surrounding that rape & murder. She becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession — venturing into Israel to search for missing details - not only because of its gruesome nature but also because it happened to take place 25 years to the day before she was born.

"Adania Shibli's Minor Detail is an intense & penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence, whether it occurred in the past or contemporaneously ... Though the time period & perspectives change, Shibli’s writing is always extraordinarily descriptive, minutely detailing each movement that either protagonist makes. In a place in which the borders & landscapes are changing all the time, Shibli gives a sense that all that can be counted on is the discrete physical movements of a person’s body ..." — Katie de Cunha Lewin, L.A. Review Of Books

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Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first 2 novels appeared in English as Touch & We Are All Equally Far from Love. Shibli was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 & 2004. 

Shibli was to receive Germany’s 2023 LiBeraturpreis for Minor Detail at the Frankfurt Book Fair. However, officials canceled the ceremony as well as a planned discussion, citing the war in Israel that began on October 7th. 1,100 writers & publishers signed an open letter in protest of this decision. Additionally, many authors who had planned to attend decided to withdraw.