Two men, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, travel towards a monastery near Bethlehem, in the Judean hills. There they will speak of the loss of their daughters: 13-year-old Smadar, killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber, and 10-year-old Abir, shot in the back of the head with a rubber bullet fired by a member of the Israeli Defence Forces.
Rami is a graphic designer, the son of a Holocaust survivor, “an Israeli, a Jew, a seventh-generation Jerusalemite”. Bassam works at the Palestinian Archives. He was born in a cave near Hebron and, while still a teenager, he was sentenced to seven years’ jail for terrorism offences. Theirs is an unlikely friendship, an extraordinary partnership, one that carries to the world their joint plea for justice, tolerance and peace.
Drawing on documented interviews with Rami and Bassam, as well as his own research, Irish-American novelist Colum McCann takes the appalling facts of these two men’s lives and forges from them a novel of extraordinary beauty and complexity.
A work that weaves together “elements of speculation, memory, fact and imagination”, Apeirogon has all the attributes that mark the best of McCann’s writing: the fusion of fact and fiction, the impression of the historical within the present moment, and the unexpected patterns and correspondences that imbue a life with meaning. Yet here McCann takes these attributes to a new level. It is almost as though this is the novel he has been all his life working towards.
Read the article by Diane Stubbings in The Australian.