Enter Ghost by  Isabella Hammad

Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad

This is passionate, poignant and highly topical story of family tensions and Arab identity - as the personal meets the political head on. Following the failure of her marriage, actress Sonia leaves London to visit her sister in Haifa. She is soon persuaded to appear in a production of Hamlet in the West Bank – a crowded world full of check points, tension and tear gas. Here she finds that learning the lines is the easy part.

Extract

Shouting reached us from the next street over, and then screaming. We saw children running, heard more cracks of tear gas, saw several more thin loops of white, reaching higher this time. A voice speaking Hebrew, warped by a megaphone. Gunfire. I followed the others in a crouching run round a corner. Within a couple of streets, there was practically no noise at all.

Parallels
  • The Retrospective by A. B. Yehoshua
  • The Jerusalem File by Joel Stone
  • Friendly Fire by A. B. Yehoshua