Minor Detail

Minor Detail joins the pantheon of short political novels you can read in one sitting—1984, Darkness at Noon, The Stranger. The novel begins in the early dog days of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and pivots into a new point of view that moves beyond a binary story of warfare. Translated from Arabic, the staid prose belies the characters’ deep well of loneliness and desire to make sense of the past. In a revolutionary year, it feels appropriate to celebrate Shibli’s book that features literal revolutionaries, especially those who seem too insignificant to even be noticed, those that the written record threatens to cross out and write over.