3 ideas
Walid Dahman, a Palestinian from Gaza living in London, travels with his wife Julia to Israel to carry out her dying mother's wish that her ashes be returned to Acre, the city she left decades earlier. The journey sets exile, burial and homeland against each other: the dead are allowed a return that living refugees are denied, and the couple find themselves visitors in a place that is supposed to be theirs.
'Present absentee' is the Israeli legal status given to Palestinians who remained inside the state after 1948 but were counted as absent from their property, which was then taken. The novel draws on this idea of a person physically present yet legally dispossessed, showing how displacement can work through a legal category rather than through departure alone.
The novel is built as a concerto in four movements, each carried by several narrating voices that return and answer one another the way instruments do. Because no single narrator owns the story, the form refuses one authoritative national account and makes loss something heard as layered, overlapping testimony.