TPAN

A book club centred on Palestinian literary excellence

Cost: Free, but books sourced at own cost

Run time: 2 hours

Capacity: 12 participants

This month's book selection: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

*We recommend that participants have finished at least 80% of the book by the meetup date in order to affectively engage in discussions. There is no rule on how you read the book (physical, e-book or audiobook are all acceptable forms of reading)

Where to get it: 

The Book of Disappearance is available at the Tasmanian state library.

It is also currently for sale at Fullers Bookshop and Black Swan Bookshop and various online retailers.

There are ebook versions of this book available also.

About The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

• Genre: fiction, magical realism
• Originally written in Arabic, and translated to English by Sinan Antoon.

What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?

Alaa, a young Palestinian, is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel, Alaa’s neighbour and friend, is a liberal Zionist, critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza yet faithful to the project of Israel. When he wakes up one morning to find that all Palestinians have suddenly vanished, Ariel begins searching for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance; that search, and his reaction to it, intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question. Between the stories of Alaa and Ariel are the people of Jaffa and Tel Aviv against whose ordinary lives these fissures and questions play out.

Critically acclaimed in Arabic, spare yet evocative, intensely intelligent in its interplay of perspectives, The Book of Disappearance is an unforgettable glimpse into contemporary Palestine.

About Ibtisam Azem

Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa, the city from which her mother and maternal grandparents were internally displaced in 1948. She lived in Jerusalem before moving to Germany and later to the US.

Azem holds an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, with minors in German and English Literature, from Freiburg University (Germany), as well as an MA in Social Work from New York University. She works as a senior correspondent for the Arabic newspaper, Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, in New York.