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Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad

Vintage, 2024
323 p.
ISBN 978-1-5299-1999-8

Post hau ingelesez dago.

Donostia Book Club starts 2025 meetings on January, 13th with a very ambitious novel: Enter Ghost by a British-Palestinian author, Isabella Hammad. We follow the protagonist, Sonia from London and her work as a theater actress to her homeland. She goes to visit her sister, Haneen in Haifa. Officially, it’s to have a long needed vacation break, but in reality Sonia is re-evaluating her whole life.

The narration constantly skips back and forward in time to find out more about the sisters’ relationship, Sonia’s failed marriage, miscarriage, unsuccesful affair with a theater director and the wayeach of the sisters is feeling about Palestine.

The book is full of unresolved conflincts, unsaid words, ghosts and haunting on a personal, family and country level. All that leads Sonia to join a production of Hamlet on the West Bank. Knowing the play is definitely enriching the way we read Enter Ghost, but it is possible to understand it without any knowledge about Shakespeare too.

The novel was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2024 and praised by authors such as Monica Ali. The Prize’s website provides a reading guide with some questions to discuss:

How do you think Hamlet is relevant to Sonia’s story, to the other characters in the book, and to the wider Israel-Palestine context? How well does it work as a metaphor or framing device? Does theatre provide a way for people to understand politic,s and the world around them, better? In what way, if so?

How did you feel about the sections of the book where Hammad represents the dialogue and action of the story as if it was a play? How did this affect your reading experience?

At one stage, Sonia describes Mariam as possessing a, ‘straightforward, repugnant, magnetic light’; how does Sonia feel about Mariam, and how would you describe their relationship?

Is Sonia and Hannan’s relationship a typical sibling dynamic? Did it feel authentic to you?

What does Hammad seem to be saying about men and masculinity with her representations of the male actors in Mariam’s production of Hamlet?

(Source: https://womensprize.com/app/uploads/2024/05/Enter-Ghost_reading_guide.pdf )

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