Minor Detail

(As described on goodreads) 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 expulsion of more than 700,000 people – and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers capture and rape a young Palestinian woman, and kill and bury her in the sand. Many years later, a woman in Ramallah becomes fascinated to the point of obsession with this ‘minor detail’ of history. A haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, Minor Detail cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession, life under occupation, and the persistent difficulty of piecing together a narrative in the face of ongoing erasure and disempowerment.

Set in

• ★
  Negev Desert · Israel

  Site of 1949 Israeli military assault on Bedouin girl
  ★ primary
• Ramallah · Palestine

  Present-day West Bank city; Part 2 setting where a Palestinian woman investigates the 1949 incident
• Ramallah · Palestinian Territories

  Home city of the narrator in the novel's second section