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Join TMR Book Club to discuss The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem (tr. Sinan Antoon) online on Sunday, February 22 at 1 pm Eastern/19:00 CET.

This book club session will be moderated by Layla AlAmmar, a writer and academic from Kuwait with a PhD in Arab literature & trauma theory. She is the author of The Pact We Made (@boroughpress) and Silence is a Sense (@algonquinbooks).

Longlisted for the 2025 International the novel grapples with both the memory of loss and the loss of memory for the Palestinians. What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty forty-eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event.

Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.

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