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Adania Shibli’s haunting meditation on war, violence and memory, which cuts to the heart of the Palestinian experience of dispossession. Translated by Elisabeth Jaquette.

In the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Israeli soldiers rape a young Palestinian woman they find in the Negev desert, killing her and burying her in the sand. In the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah embarks on a journey of discovery into the events surrounding that rape and murder. She becomes fascinated by it to the point of obsession, not only because of its gruesome nature but also because it happened to take place 25 years to the day before she was born.