Author
The Book of Disappearance
The Book of Disappearance is a speculative novel by Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem, published in Arabic in 2014 and rendered into English by Sinan Antoon in 2019. Set over a single forty-eight-hour period, the novel imagines a world in which every Palestinian Arab within Israel vanishes without explanation. The story unfolds through two perspectives: the diary of Alaa Assaf, a Palestinian man in Jaffa who grieves his grandmother and wrestles with a city whose name has been overwritten, and the account of Ariel Levy, an Israeli journalist and neighbor who discovers Alaa's empty apartment and slowly begins to inhabit it. What begins as a story about mass absence becomes a meditation on presence, memory, ownership, and the politics of erasure. The novel operates between literary fiction and speculative fiction, pressing directly on questions of Palestinian identity, colonial memory, and what it means to be rendered invisible.