A review by fleeno
Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

5.0

 After many years away from Haifa, actor Sonia returns home after a failed affair with a theatre director in London to visit her sister Haneen who lectures at a Tel Aviv university. Through Haneen Sonia meets Mariam who is staging an Arabic production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Before long Sonia is asked to play Gertrude and although initially resistant, Sonia finds herself drawn into the play and the lives of those involved. For Sonia who has been away for decades she feels simultaneously at home and a stranger in her land. Checkpoint challenges, arrests and interrogations, protests and the constant Kafkaesque rules continue though the book both in current time and in Sonia's memories. As she connects with the cast, her sister, and family, Sonia begins to question her connection with her country and people. 

I really enjoyed this book and how it showed the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and those who have Israeli citizenship and the type of 'equality' they live with. Through a quirk of birth Haneen has Israeli citizenship but Sonia has British citizenship, this means they can travel to different areas, Sonia can travel to the West Bank but Haneen can't, there are different roads they are supposed to travel on. The bureaucracy surrounding the play is extreme and bizarre, the location is terrorised, the power turned off, strange mind games are played and spies are sent to the set. There is a tangible sense of how fractured both Sonia and Haneen's family and the Palestinian state and people are. It does require a little bit of knowledge of the history though there is a legend at the back explaining terms like '48ers, nakba, intifada ect. One of the saddest parts of the book is Sonia and Haneen are watching a protest on tv and Sonia asks Haneen if it's getting worse and she replies no, it will get better, it will change, no one wants it to get worse. This was published in April 2023 and it's so sad that in just a few short months things became far worse for everyone.