The Book of Disappearance, a novel long-listed for the 2025 International Booker Prize, asks: What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? This is the story of two cities in the same place, and two inhabitants, a Palestinian and an Israeli. For one, Jaffa is a suburb of Tel Aviv. For the other, it’s the scene of a haunting by an uprooted people.

After a frenetic search Alaa, a young Palestinian man, finds his missing grandmother on a bench looking out to sea. She had died there. Her memory haunts him, as his grandmother’s own memories of pre-Nakba Jaffa haunted her. Alaa begins a diary to process his grief and regret. His Jewish neighbour/acquaintance, Ariel, is a journalist both critical of the West Bank and Gaza military occupation and profoundly shaped by his prominent family’s Zionism. When the Palestinians disappear, Ariel muses in his news articles on their absence. The city stumbles as bus drivers and hospital workers fail to show up for work. While exploring Alaa’s apartment Ariel finds his diary, and we read along with Ariel of Alaa’s grandmother’s experience of being a refugee in her own homeland. A breach opens between what the reader and what Ariel takes from this diary. Confusion and paranoia increases, and the surveillance and military apparatus that once was turned on Palestinians turns on Israelis.

To the speculative question of the novel’s premise, the ultimate answer is chilling. Though this reissued translation could have benefitted from a closer copy edit, The Book of Disappearance is thought-provoking, unsettling and elegantly evocative.

Reviewed by Wendy Waring

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