Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

Adania Shibli is a genius, and her books are diamonds: so much ache and fury and beauty compacted into perfectly-weighted words. Minor Detail asks what happens when one individual act becomes the lens through which we see a century of history, as that one, ramifying act – a Palestinian woman captured and raped by Israeli soldiers during the Nakba – also turns, through its facets, into a detail that exemplifies and unfolds and bears that bigger history. Scalpel-delicate, Minor Detail will introduce you to a world-class writer who will not be silenced.

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A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

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Bookshop Choice: Chosen by Sam Fisher and the team at Burley Fisher Books, Hackney, London

Length: 3 hours and 54 minutes

Not available in the US.