Minor Detail

‘Immediately after I finished reading this miraculous novel, I read it again; both times, it sliced through my heart. I believe it will be one for the ages.’
— Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

‘Adania Shibli takes a gamble in entrusting our access to the key event in her novel – the rape and murder of a young Bedouin woman – to two profoundly self-absorbed narrators – an Israeli psychopath and a Palestinian amateur sleuth high on the autism scale – but her method of indirection justifies itself fully as the book reaches its heart-stopping conclusion.’
— J.M. Coetzee, 2003 Nobel Prize-winner

‘A troubling and powerful novel.’
— David Mills, The Times

‘An extraordinary work of art, Minor Detail is continuously surprising and absorbing: a very rare blend of moral intelligence, political passion and formal virtuosity.’
— Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger

‘Adania Shibli’s exceptional novel Minor Detail belongs to the genre of the novel as resistance, as revolutionary text. This is the political novel we have all been waiting for.’
— Meena Kandasamy, author of When I Hit You

‘The terror Shibli evokes intensifies slowly, smouldering, until it is shining off the page.... The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good.’
— Fatima Bhutto, Guardian

‘Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma.... For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis.’
— Robyn Creswell, New York Review of Books

‘A sophisticated, oblique novel about empathy and the urge to right wrongs’
— Anthony Cummins, Observer

‘An intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence – Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control.’
— Katie da Cunha Lewin, Los Angeles Review of Books