Specters tells the story of Radwa and Shagar, two women born on the same day. The narrative alternates between their childhoods, their days at work, their married and unmarried lives, and the two books they are writing, both called Specters. This lively metafictional novel is a mix of genres: part autobiography, part oral history, part documentary, part fiction. As the narrative moves back and forth between Radwa's novel Specters and Shagar's history Specters (about the massacre at Deir Yassin, a Palestinian Arab village near Jerusalem in April 1948), Ashour unites the projects of history and literature and blurs the boundaries between the personal and the political in one compellingly readable meditation on contemporary life in a fractured world.

Translated by: Barbara Romaine