Isabella Hammad’s 2019 debut novel, The Parisian, was roundly praised for its scale and humanity and won the Betty Trask prize. On the face of it, her second novel contrasts strongly with her first. The Parisian is a historical epic with a questing, romantic male protagonist; Enter Ghost is set in the modern day, and focuses on Sonia Nasir, a 35-year-old actor, who is arguably in stasis. Yet Hammad’s second novel is unmistakably the first book’s direct descendant: a story of Palestine, driven by questions of identity and belonging.
It begins with Sonia’s arrival at an airport. She is questioned and strip-searched, and finally allowed through immigration to see the sign: Welcome to Israel. She is visiting her sister, Haneen, in Haifa, but immediately takes a taxi to Akka, determined to “see something beautiful first”. Standing on the clifftop, watching the bathers below, she is as disconnected from the bright-blue sea as the trauma of being strip-searched, and imagines herself falling to the rocks below, “smashed in an instant and bloody on the rock”. She speaks English to the Palestinian taxi driver – “I resisted the idea of being bonded to this person” – and it’s with this refusal of her presence that Sonia, ghostlike, arrives in the land of her ancestors.
