The Book of Disappearance

One morning in contemporary Tel Aviv, every Palestinian citizen of Israel has vanished. Forty-eight hours later, the Israelis left behind are trying to work out what has happened and how to respond to it.

The novel alternates between two narrators. Alaa is a young Palestinian man who disappeared along with the rest, and his voice survives in a journal where he talks with his dead grandmother. Ariel is his Jewish neighbor, a journalist who searches for clues to the mass disappearance and struggles to take in the shock of it.

The two voices set two memories against each other. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who criticizes the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, yet still believes in Israel's national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother's account of being driven out of Jaffa and living as a refugee in her own homeland.

This is speculative literary fiction, built on a single unsettling premise and held together by those two perspectives. Its subject is the Palestinian experience of remembering a loss while also losing the memory itself. Originally written in Arabic, it appears here in a translation by Antoon, and it brings the lives of Palestinians inside Israel to English readers.