Enter Ghost Paperback – 23 February 2023

Great read.

Absorbing, insightful, kept me up reading it, book that explores fraught relationships between siblings, colonized and colonizers, artists and academics. Extraordinary book.

I'll say this for Isabella Hammad: She can turn a phrase. If nothing else, her two novels make you enamoured of language. She's obviously an intelligent and sensitive person, and her books are, too, but when I think of "The Parisian," it is always her command of language that first comes to mind."Enter Ghost" is about Sonia, a middle-aged British-Palestinian actress who returns to Palestine (or Israel, if you prefer) after a disastrous affair in London and is given the opportunity to play Gertrude in "Hamlet." I say "returns" with the full knowledge that, in this context, the word is loaded. Palestinians want the right of return in the wake of the war of 1948; Israel denies them that. It is this tension, the struggle for Palestinian self-autonomy, to be seen as human, which forms the heart of the novel.This book isn't a crowd pleaser. It knows where it's going and it gets there, but it can meander a little, particularly in the first chapters. Stick with it. The pay-off is fantastic, and one I hope people outside the direct sphere of Palestine-Israel, like me, try it. I found it profoundly moving. I do hope it finds a wide audience.

This is a really good book to read as it gives an inside view of what was happening in Israel/Palesting before what is happening now.

I loved this book. It was a wonderfully written novel but I feel I understood the Palestinian viewpoint , more than from reading a non-fiction work.