On August 10, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) killed five Al Jazeera journalists, including Anas al-Sharif, who the IDF claimed was “the head of a Hamas terrorist cell”, without providing any supporting evidence. The military organisation hasn’t shared anything regarding why it killed others. It doesn’t have to, because it has all the means – and support – to kill every Palestinian and silence those who are trying to amplify the atrocities the Palestinians are witnessing.But what emboldens the IDF and the Israeli government is the silent spectatorship of non-actors in what’s transpiring. Some decades later, there might be someone who’d ask, ‘But what did others do while this genocide occurred?’ I’m sure this question will be met with another silence, signalling complicity and guilt.It’s often noted that reality is stranger than fiction. However, when the strangeness of the ‘fictive’ world gets matched with what’s happening in the ‘real’ world, then that presents a creative challenge to artists trying to make sense of their time. Unsurprisingly, several generations of Palestinians have managed to represent their annihilation in multifarious ways despite facing this challenge, forcing readers to reflect on the loss of people, homes, stories they’re ignoring. The 2025 International Booker-longlisted novel by Ibtisam Azem, The Book of Disappearance, is one such recent example. Translated by Sinan Antoon from the Arabic, this 2014 novel’s premise is not only outrageous but also eerily real at the moment: what if all the Palestinians disappear without a trace?Isn’t this what the settler-colonists fantasise about? What happens when their dream comes true? And after its materialisation, who will be telling Palestinians’ stories? Often, there’s a discussion of appropriation; however, in the face of events, if someone chooses to tell the stories of those who aren’t there to say them themselves, then what becomes of this political act of telling stories?A slim volume like Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (translated by Elisabeth Jacquette; another International Booker-longlisted book), with its riveting storytelling, provocative proposition, and engaging cast of characters, The Book of Disappearance is as necessary a read as it is haunting. Over email, Azem answered a few questions from The Wire about the book.Edited excerpts from the interview follow.You’ve noted that the idea of The Book of Disappearance arose out of what the former prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, wished (Gaza being swallowed by the sea) or what Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, regretted (that the “Israelis did not finish the job” in 1948). But careless speech is one thing and fiction-writing is another. As a novelist, how challenging was it for you to re-engage audiences by introducing a discomforting, total erasure of Palestinians, which is not entirely fictive, given what’s unfolding?This disappearance in the novel has many layers. It is a character in and of itself. But disappearance is a mirror to what took place during the Nakba and afterwards, and what Palestinians call an ongoing Nakba until today, with the genocide in Gaza.We must remember that in 1948, Zionist gangs, and what later became the IDF, destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages and displaced half of the Palestinians, 750,000, disallowing them and their descendants to return until today. It also depopulated most of the coastal cities of Palestine, including Jaffa. Before the Nakba, Jaffa was one of the most important Palestinian cities, culturally, economically and politically.[Therefore,] choosing [disappearance] as a character in the novel is intentional. A significant number of those living in Gaza were ethnically cleansed from Jaffa and [the] surrounding villages back in 1948. So, this is one layer of the symbolism of the disappearance. Most important is for it to be a mirror to reflect on and remember what took place and to warn of what could take place. It is important to note that [the novel] was published in Arabic, back in 2014.Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan AntoonThe Book of DisappearanceAnd Other Stories (UK)/Simon & Schuster (India), 2025In the chapter titled Flower Farm, Shimon considers “what he was going to lose that day because of their [his Palestinian workers’] absence”. This thought cements the fact that it’s the minor inconveniences that concern most people, because the politics of care isn’t worth extending to anyone if it disturbs one’s own social equilibrium. Isn’t it?Although the disappearance of Palestinians is the central event and character, if you will, in the novel, it was important for me that their voices do not disappear. The chronicling Alaa does in his red notebook is writing down oral memory. The memory of the grandmother who survived the Nakba. It is also the memory of the future. It is often said that Palestinians are obsessed with the past and must look to the future. This is said to many colonised and oppressed minorities, such as [the] indigenous people in the United States and elsewhere in [other] settler-colonial countries.In reality, we speak of the past because we want to change the future and we want to warn against repeating this past so that the past does not become our future that repeats itself.As for minor inconveniences, one aspect of creative writing for me is for the author to take minor and marginal details and centre them. Making us better understand the meaning of wars, conflicts, occupation, gender and class oppression. The novelist is the one who stays with the people when the politicians and journalists, along with their cameras, leave. The novelist stays with the characters in the calm after the storm to mine their loneliness and their internal struggles and probe how they deal with the challenges and contradictions of their surroundings. It’s important for me that characters be three-dimensional, whether I agree with them or not.Maybe I’m extrapolating; however, the way Ariel (Levy), a seemingly liberal and sympathetic person and a friend to Alaa (Assaf), occupies the latter’s empty flat upon his disappearance. His choice to stay there and leverage his friend’s red notebook to file opinion pieces and, eventually, write a book on this incomprehensible disappearance seemed quite symbolic of how easily the ones who survive those made to flee exercise their right to assume occupancy in the face of events. Your thoughts? One of the reasons why I decided to write this novel was that there is much talk about the occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967 and the intentional glossing over [of] the primary crime, which is the Nakba and the colonisation of Palestine. In wars and conflicts, there is the soldier who pulls the trigger, and will one day perhaps say, “I was only following orders.” And there is another, who will say, “I did not know,” and a third who will claim something else. In reality, there is the silent majority, and this majority is of particular interest to me. Especially in democratic or semi-democratic systems. Why does it allow crimes to be committed in its name? How do they formulate their excuses? I try to expose those who praised the emperor and told him how lovely his clothes were when he had none. To speak about what is taking place today: How can the world, not only Israelis, or anyone, claim that there is no genocide or deliberate starvation and stay silent?In invoking objects like the Singer sewing machine alongside the constant mention of renaming of places, were you trying to reflect on one’s convoluted understanding of reality? Often it appears in the novel that whenever Tata is reminiscing the pre-Nakba time, it tends to confuse Alaa, for he can’t seem to make easy associations, signalling a doubt in his mind about the veracity of Tata’s recollections (e.g., “Your memory, which is engraved in my mind, has all these holes in it”)?Oral memory plays an important role in the history of people who lived under colonialism. This is the history that Alaa’s grandmother narrates, but the external world tries to cast doubts on this history and its veracity. This is not restricted to Palestine; it takes place in other settler-colonial contexts, too. Alaa lives in a settler-colonial society, and he is trying to cleanse his memory of the official history of the victors. It is an act of decolonisation, but it doesn’t happen overnight, and [it] is a complicated process. The novel takes the reader into Alaa’s internal struggles, and this is what novels should do. Not necessarily give answers, but allow readers to engage and inhabit these worlds.You mention several musicians and songs throughout the novel; there’s David Broza’s The Woman by My Side and Fairuz’s ‘Yes, there is hope’, for example. Could you help share if, while building this cast of characters, you imagined their specific music choices? Furthermore, what sort of a relationship do you share with music and were there a few songs in particular that perhaps played on loop for the three years you worked on this book?Music plays an important role in my life. I listened to a lot of music while writing. It helps me inhabit the worlds of the characters as I write them. In addition to what you mentioned in your question, I listened to Umm Kulthum and sometimes popular Palestinian songs that I didn’t mention in the novel. Those that are sung at weddings and feasts.I like traditional Arab music and songs (by Fairuz, Umm Kulthum, Abdel Wahab, Abdel Halim, Warda, Sheikh Emam). I also listen to more recent and popular songs, Arab rap, especially Palestinian, such as DAM (Da Arab MCs). I listened to Le Trio Joubran [while] I wrote this novel. I like instrumental music as well, jazz and blues, as well as music from other parts of the world.Among other things, the death of Alaa’s father by suicide appears strategic in a way that it poses a question whether it was his own will or whether this falls under institutional murder. Was it intentional to make people think of it?I wanted to address the subject of suicide because it is still a tough one to tackle socially due to the stigma surrounding it. I wanted to write about how trauma affects us and how certain subjects remain taboo.Could you share a bit about the sort of work that went into collaborating with Sinan Antoon, your translator and your husband, on this novel? It wasn’t a collaboration. Sinan is a scholar of Arabic literature, a poet, a novelist and an experienced translator who has translated [Mahmoud] Darwish, Saadi Youssef, Sargon Boulus, among others. I do believe that translation is a creative act, and Sinan didn’t need any help. We read each other’s work, and he knows my work and how I think very well. The proximity and the personal relationship are a boon, but it isn’t a prerequisite for a good translation. I didn’t take part in the translation, but helped in answering some queries, of course.Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.