Something’s happened, an event shrouded in mystery: around midnight, a night like any other night, all Palestinians have disappeared, vanished into thin air. Nobody knows where drivers, farm labourer, doctors, nurses, elderly and young people have gone. What if there were no more Palestinians? What could happen to the Israelis? What could happen in everyone’s life if there was no more the enemy, the scapegoat, the alibi? The Palestinian writer Ibtisam Azem presents one of the most groundbreaking novels of the Arab literary scene.

Ibtisam Azem, a Palestinian journalist and writer, has published two novels in Arabic: Sariq al-Nawm (The Sleeping Thief, 2011) and Sifr al-Ikhtifaa (The Book of Disappearance, 2014), both for Dar al-Jamal (Beirut, Baghdad and Freiberg am Neckar). The Book of Disappearance finally arrives in the Italian version. Born and raised in Taybeh, in the north of Jaffa, Ibtisam Azem has studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later at the University of Freiburg in Germany. She works as a journalist in New York for the Arabic newspaper “al-Araby al-Jadeed” and as co-editor in chief of the “ezine Jadaliyya”.