Should she stay, or leave?

Alaa's diary is an act of resistance.

By Aayushi Rana

What remains when everything vanishes?

A shadow?

A voice in the dark?

The echo of footsteps on stones that remember?

In Ibtisam Azem's The Book of Disappearance, long listed for Booker Prize for Literature in 2025, all Palestinians living in their original homeland occupied by Israel, vanish overnight.

Gone.

The streets of Jaffa in the West Bank fall silent like after a storm has passed by.. Empty homes, still holding the warmth and magnamity of a mother. Coffee cups half-drunk on kitchen tables. The world continues, as if nothing, as if no one, was ever here.

Two voices. Alaa, a Palestinian writer. His diary, left behind, pages yellowing, ink still fresh with life. And Ariel, an Israeli journalist, who finds these words, these whispers from the disappeared, and begins to see what was always invisible to him.

Early in his diary, Alaa writes about shadows.

Walking through old Jaffa as a child, he would see his shadow beside other shadows. Sometimes his shadow would leave him, drift away, belong to someone else. He thought he was mad. Kept this secret, buried deep.

Until Tata, his grandmother, laughing, kissed his head and said: Don't be scared, habibi. All Jaffans who have stayed back see shadows walking beside them in the old city. Even the Jews hear voices at night. They go outside to look. Find no one.

October 7th was nearly 300 days ago.

This book was published in 2014.

What Azem imagined in fiction has become daily reality. Families disappear not in a single night, but slowly, methodically, on camera. Children are buried under rubble that used to be their homes. Entire neighborhoods are turned to dust.

The numbers are staggering, but numbers can't capture the weight of what's happening. Each lost child is a universe of stories that will never be told. Each destroyed home means generations of memory turned to nothing.

The silence Azem writes about in her novel is the same silence we're witnessing now, except that this one is real. and we are all watching it happen. 24x7.

What makes this novel beautiful, despite its pain, is how it insists on memory. Stays with it.

Alaa's diary is an act of resistance. 

Even in disappearing, he refuses to be forgotten. 

He writes down the small things, the smell of za'atar, the sound of Arabic in the streets, the way light falls on old Jaffa stones. He preserves what others might not notice or might choose not to see.

This is what Palestinians have been doing for decades.

Writing, filming, singing, painting, creating archives of existence and memory, because they know how easily the world forgets.

When homes are demolished, when olive trees are uprooted, when children become numbers on lists, someone must remember. Someone must say: we were here. We are still here.

Azem writes simply. She doesn't overwhelm you with politics or history lessons. Instead, she writes about people living ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances. A woman buying groceries. A man walking by the sea. Lovers meeting in cafes. These moments matter because they are human, and they are fragile. Ephemeral.

The book shares something with Zoulfa Katouh's As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, though they approach different wars with the same understanding of loss. Katouh gives us Salama, eighteen years old, a pharmacy student turned emergency medic in war-torn Homs.

Like Alaa, she watches her world crumble, parents gone, brother gone, home gone, future gone.

Both protagonist face the impossible choice: stay or leave?

Loyalty, or survival?

Both are haunted in their own ways. Salama sees Khawf, her fear made flesh, visible only to her. Alaa walks with shadows of the disappeared. Where Katouh gives you blood on hospital floors, children's bodies, impossible choices made in real time, Azem uses magic realism to reveal what's already invisible in plain sight.

Different methods, same truth. Displacement isn't just losing a place, it's losing yourself, becoming a ghost in your own story.

There's a scene where Ariel walks through empty Palestinian neighborhoods and finally sees them, not as background, but as proof that something precious existed here and now is gone. This is what the book does to you; it makes you see, really see, what was always there, but has been rendered invisible.

I keep thinking about those shadows in Jaffa, voices calling in darkness, children who won't grow up to write their stories. The question remains, at the heart of everything: What happens when a people disappear? Not in fiction, but in real life, right in front of everyone.

This book will break your heart, but it will also wake you up. It asks questions that sit uncomfortable in your chest: What does it mean to live on land where others lived before? What's our responsibility to remember? How do we witness the disappearance happening now, today, in real time?

Read this book and let it sit with you. Let it make you uncomfortable, let it remind you that every number, every destroyed home, every name is a universe of stories we'll never hear. And then decide, so, what will you do with this knowledge?

A cease-fire and atonement, to The Book of Disappearance.

The Book of Disappearance

By Ibtisam Azem

Simon & Schuster

Rs 499

Pg: 240

Translated by Sinan Antoon

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Aayushi Rana is a post-graduate History student from Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and Senior Researcher at Digital Forensics Research Analytics Centre (DFRAC), a Delhi-based fact-checking organization. She is also a Digital Forensics trainer, having conducted training sessions for journalists from across the world, and for school students in Delhi on misinformation, fake news, digital safety, and skilled verification techniques. A former English and Social Sciences educator at a prestigious private school in Delhi, her work currently focuses on media literacy and socio-political research.