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Minor Detail
Minor Detail
Minor Detail
Audiobook3 hours

Minor Detail

Written by Adania Shibli

Narrated by Siiri Scott

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

()

About this audiobook

A searing, beautiful novel meditating on war, violence, memory, and the sufferings of the Palestinian people.

Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand.

Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Adania Shibli masterfully overlays these two translucent narratives of exactly the same length to evoke a present forever haunted by the past.

Contains mature themes.
LanguageEnglish
TranslatorElisabeth Jaquette
Release dateFeb 9, 2021
ISBN9781705297902
Minor Detail
Author

Adania Shibli

Adania Shibli was born in Palestine in 1974. Her first two novels appeared in English with Clockroot Books as Touch (tr. Paula Haydar, 2010) and We Are All Equally Far From Love (tr. Paul Starkey, 2012). She was awarded the Young Writer’s Award by the A. M. Qattan Foundation in 2002 and 2004. Minor Detail was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021.

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Reviews for Minor Detail

Rating: 4.486111111111111 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

72 ratings5 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My mouth was left hanging open by the end of it.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    this was...a masterpiece. adania shibli has written a piece of literature that is just so powerful and masterful in terms of execution, storytelling, and writing. the ending was so explosive. i thought there will be more after she was shot, but no. the audiobook cuts off to the credits, and that gave me chills throughout my body. chills.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    FUCK. wow…. the horrors of palestinians is so unfair … i can’t even describe what this book made me feel
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Adania Shibli construye la novela en torno al asesinato de una joven durante la guerra de 1948 por soldados israelíes y de la escritora que trata de escribir su historia, pero no sabe cómo lidiar con las fronteras. Con una prosa certera en la que los adjetivos son pocos, pero cuando aparecen son los precisos, introduce al opresivo mundo de Israel, desde su creación hasta el día de hoy, colmado de fronteras y puntos de revisión que no son nada fáciles de llevar para una persona neurotípica, menos para la narradora que sin decir que es neurodivergente, Shibli, lo hace evidente en la forma en la que se expresa y por cómo actúa. Uns novela que llega a ser d dolorosa.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I liked that it was short. The narrator was too slow and soft spoken, so I sped it up to 1.5, which amplified the main character’s outsized anxiety and inappropriately directed paranoia. If it had been longer or if I couldn’t speed it up, I think I would have abandoned it early on.
    Now that I’ve thought about it, I probably would recommend reading it rather than listening to the audiobook. I didn’t like the audiobook pace or voice.

    2 people found this helpful