“Adania Shibli has written one of the most clear-eyed and plainly honest literary accounts of the unceasing physical and emotional toll that comes with living under permanent occupation. From the most seemingly straightforward premise—two young Palestinians, a boy and girl, attempting to make something of their lives despite the daily humiliation of Israeli apartheid—we are shown the spectrum of cruelties any system of domination demands, from prison cells to university halls, from the vindictive soldier to the well-meaning liberal. Written in a telescoping, inimitable style, Delusion is a masterpiece, from one of the most vital and unflinching authors alive.” —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Suffused with a tranced and difficult beauty, Shibli’s prose mourns and reclaims the Palestinian experience. A major novelist, she has pulled from the wreckage another necessary and remarkable book.” —Anne Enright, author of The Gathering
“Delusion is beautifully narrated in a voice that is never raised. In it, Adania Shibli powerfully portrays life under occupation and the intimidation and frustration of human possibility.” —Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“Adania Shibli is one of the most vivid chroniclers of the occupation of Palestine. With Delusion she has gifted us an urgent novel, one that delivers a knock on the heart.” —Hisham Matar, author of My Friends
“Delusion is a novel that will be read for generations to come, and it is also a novel that speaks to us now. It is one of the most shattering, exacting, and profound novels I have ever read.” —Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records
“Delusion is a novel that is matted with the everyday texture of occupation. It will ask terrible questions of you, it will make it difficult for you to sleep. Adania Shibli has forensic intensity and a great clarity. The depth of grief in this novel is matched by its exactitude. It is an act of giant perspective, a natural history of ongoing erasure.” —Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future
“In this exceptional novel, Adania Shibli chronicles the timelessness of two childhood friends whose lives run parallel despite their distant and different experiences. They stand in for a population disintegrating steadily as they adapt in extreme, moving, and sometimes ordinary ways to the barriers placed before them. Each must fight voiceless inertia as hope and possibility are flattened by surveillance, random violence, and suspicion. After each blow they reemerge to remake their world. Day by day, minute by minute, Delusion performs survival in the face of the daily erosion of a tomorrow, which sometimes arrives only to further erode the possibility of another tomorrow as the land itself is suffocated by its colonization. And still Delusion stays present to a reality feeding off the relentless violence hellbent on the extinction of these heartbroken characters who are forced to contend with the repeated assaults and ordinary failures even from those who love them. Adania Shibli has written beyond what writing can bear. The beauty of this genius work is matched only by its steadfastness amidst, in Shibli’s words, ‘the disintegration of words’ and worlds.” —Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
