What if an entire people vanished overnight, leaving behind their homes, memories, and stories? The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and translated into English by Sinan Antoon, begins with this unsettling premise: all Palestinians within the borders of historic Palestine have mysteriously disappeared. There is no violence, no warning—only a sudden absence. What unfolds is a quiet, powerful exploration of memory, identity, and the settler-colonial psyche.
Azem’s speculative twist is not a device for spectacle, but a way of reckoning with history. As she puts it, “every Palestinian lives in the presence of absence” (Azem, ArabLit, 2024). Through the lens of absence, Azem unearths the deeply rooted tensions within Israeli society, the fragility of liberal Zionism, and the persistent reverberations of the Nakba.
Two Voices, One Rupture
The novel is told through the intertwined perspectives of Alaa, a Palestinian journalist in Jaffa, and Ariel, his Jewish Israeli neighbor and friend. After Alaa’s grandmother dies peacefully on a bench overlooking the sea, he begins recording his memories in a diary addressed to her. This diary becomes a central narrative thread, filled with personal recollections, fragments of family history, and reflections on displacement. Then, Alaa—along with every other Palestinian—disappears.
Ariel wakes up to a country altered. He finds Alaa’s apartment empty, the diary left behind. As he begins to read it, Ariel becomes a kind of second narrator—filtering Alaa’s memories through his own confusion, curiosity, and privilege. Their dynamic is complex and uneasy; once close neighbors, Ariel and Alaa now exist in entirely different planes of reality. In Ariel’s appropriation of the diary and his silent occupancy of Alaa’s space, Azem stages a quiet critique of colonial entitlement.
Memory as Resistance
While the disappearance is the novel’s catalyst, it is memory that propels the narrative. Alaa’s diary is a preservation of Palestinian presence. “The sea’s symbolism,” Azem explains, “is internalized by Alaa as he tries to decolonize his own being and reestablish his relationship with Palestine” (ArabLit, 2024). The sea becomes a recurring motif in the novel, both a witness and a threshold, much like the diary itself.
Azem has spoken about the influence of her own family history on the novel. Her maternal grandparents were displaced from Jaffa in 1948, and her grandmother’s stories shaped her understanding of place and loss. “She lost everything,” Azem recalls. “Not only materially. The social fabric and networks were destroyed. She had to live her entire life with this absence/disappearance” (ArabLit, 2024).
That inheritance—of memory, displacement, and silence—is carried into the novel through Alaa’s prose. His recollections are steeped in texture: the scent of his grandmother’s coffee, the rhythm of old Jaffa’s streets, the quiet rituals of remembrance. This attention to the sensory, the intimate, resists the erasure that the disappearance represents. Even when absent, Palestinians remain present through memory, story, and place.
The Politics of Genre
While the novel’s premise might suggest science fiction or magical realism, Azem resists easy classification. The tone is quiet, the storytelling precise. The events unfold in a realist style, grounded in lived experience rather than fantastical logic. “The besetting event seems like science fiction,” notes one reviewer, “but the rest of the novel has a realist bent” (Middle East Monitor, 2024). The genre itself becomes part of the critique—by refusing to explain the disappearance, Azem emphasizes the emotional and political truth over literal answers.
Her choice to keep the disappearance unexplained is intentional. “I wanted the act of disappearance to remain without explanation and to have implications and significance for both the past and the future,” she says. “Instead of contending with the naked truth and seeing the monster colonialism itself created, the colonizer destroys the mirror” (ArabLit, 2024).
Layered Simplicity, Radical Silence
Azem’s prose—rendered with sensitivity by Antoon—avoids dramatics. There is no overt moralizing. Instead, her strength lies in evocation: showing rather than telling, letting the emotional undertow of each moment speak. As a reader, you feel the slow accumulation of loss, the quiet intrusion of occupation, the way that daily life holds history within its routines.
One of the most striking aspects of the novel is its refusal to resolve. We do not learn where the Palestinians have gone, or if they will return. Instead, we are left with Ariel—sitting in Alaa’s apartment, reading his words, wondering what to do with them. Azem leaves the conclusion ambiguous, inviting the reader to dwell in that discomfort.
In doing so, she resists the closure that fiction often offers. The unresolved ending mirrors the unresolved nature of the conflict itself. Absence, here, is not only narrative—it is political. “Translation provides a new home to the witnessing so it may continue in new languages,” Azem notes (ArabLit, 2024). The book becomes a form of resistance: a record, a memory, a presence that persists.
A Novel of Absence, A Presence that Endures
The Book of Disappearance is not a novel of spectacle. It is a novel of quiet reckonings. Through the disappearance of Palestinians, Azem wants to expose the dependence on their presence—whether as laborers, adversaries, or silent witnesses.
It is, as the International Booker Prize has recognized, a daring and essential contribution to global literature. Rooted in Palestinian memory, but speaking far beyond it.
As the sea watches, as language bears witness, Azem reminds us that even silence speaks. And sometimes, it screams.
Sources:
• Rahael Mathews, interview with Ibtisam Azem, ArabLit, September 2024
• Romana Wadi, review of The Book of Disappearance, Middle East Monitor, 2024
