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.

Times Books of the Year 2020

‘Though Minor Detail initially promises to be a kind of counterhistory or whodunit – a rescue of the victim’s story from military courts and Israeli newspapers – it turns out to be something stranger and bleaker. Rather than a discovery of hidden truths, or a search for justice, it is a meditation on the repetitions of history, the past as a recurring trauma…. For Shibli, the emblematic experience of occupation is the longue durée of ennui and isolation rather than the dramatic moment of crisis.’
— Robyn Cresswell, New York Review of Books