A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader. Starred Review. Celebrated young Palestinian writer Shibli-a playwright, author and essayist now located in the UK-makes her American debut with an exquisite, powerful novella that transports readers to her West Bank homeland. In spare prose, Shibli follows an unnamed little girl, the youngest in a large Palestinian family, as she examines her world and tries to understand her place in it. Though focused on the finest details-flakes of rust against skin, the softness of grass-Shibli takes readers to the center of a family and a culture, using the same careful, dispassionate observation to report everyday events like the father's shaving as she does to depict the death of a sibling in area violence. Like a great volume of poetry, Sibli's first novel (her second is forthcoming from Clockroot) has rhythm and unexpected momentum, and cries for re-reading. "The opening of [ Touch ]... introduces a fragile little girl, standing alone in her landscape, in the shadow of an old, rusty water tank. She touches one of the supporting legs of the tank, and tiny, cold stains of rust stick to her palm. She stretches her hand out of the shade to warm it up in the sun, and her hand becomes sprinkled with shiny dots of shimmering gold. This is, to my mind, what Adania Shibli does with her amazingly and beguilingly simple language: making the rusty stains of reality disappear, and then making them reappear in writing as stains of gold."--Anton Shammas, author of Arabesques --Anton Shammas "The most talked-about writer on the West Bank." --Ahdaf Soueif, author of In the Eye of the Sun There is much richness and beauty contained in this very short book. Shibli has an exquisite grasp of language that allows her to say a vast amount without writing much at all. Her words are precise and telling. Touch is so well crafted that the reader feels like part of the narrative, present and active in the world the author describes. She is a great talent. ...With her excellent use of language and her rich palette of images and emotional responses, Shibli has emerged as a strong new voice in Arabic literature. Her writing is nonjudgmental; she gives the reader the facts and lets them make their own judgments. Her perspective is that of the reporter, minus the sensationalism...In Touch, Shibli has created a wonderful exposition of daily Palestinian life...Yes, we all live a little differently in different parts of the world, but this work reminds us that there is more that makes us the same than there is that makes us different. In this sense Touch is a triumph. Sometimes the task of an author- particularly one who writes about a hyper-symbolized terrain- is to un-narrativize, to pull things back apart. Adania Shibli is up to this task. Touch brings us the fragmented worldview of a narrator at the cusp of understanding her world....This is not the story an adult would tell about her childhood. Instead, Shibli breaks the story down into its component, sensory parts. It's the narrator's attempt to see colors, to hear sounds, and to take hold of her own thoughts that are given center stage...Shibli certainly has found new and affecting ways of structuring the experience of dislocation and violence, and her prose- even through the lens of translation- startles the reader into re-imagining the familiar. -- M. Lynx Qualey, Rain Taxi Touch' purrs along like an extended prose poem-all words and sounds and images-as Shibli picks up the glinting fragments of the girl's experience, then turns them over in her hand to see how they refract the light of a world so radically constricted and reduced....slim but dazzlingly potent...a quizzically brilliant piece of writing that begins with the five senses, and builds up a precarious plot from there...At some point, she hears the words Sabra and Shatila. At another point, after a classmate is flogged at school, she learns that the word Palestine is forbidden. As far as sociopolitical context goes, that is about all there is. But in Shibli's spare prose, there is so much more besides. When you live in a persistent war-zone, every day is a new challenge. Touch" is a novella following a young girl in modern Palestine, as she faces life's challenges as the world continues to rage on around her. From the simple processes of life to the constant tragedies, Touch proves to be a fascinating and insightful novella, not to be missed." How often do we encounter a novelist whose writing is alchemic-whose heartrending eye for beauty seems to cause our perceptions of the world to change their substance? For the small protagonist of 'Touch', the youngest girl in a Palestinian family of ten, Adania Shibli has created a world of both extraordinary lightness and devastating intensity. A lightness of touch, a sense of distance, that allows the vision of the little girl to speak powerfully to events too harrowing to explain-the death of a bro