WINNER OF THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE’S ENCORE AWARD FOR BEST SECOND NOVEL
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Editor’s Choice
A Best Book of the Year: Boston Globe, Vulture, Electric Literature, Sunday Times, Times (UK), and the Chicago Public Library
“Terrific… Enter Ghost though contemporary, is thoroughly infused with Palestine’s past — and thoroughly haunted by Sonia’s. Hammad, who is both a delicate writer and an exact one, intertwines the two, taking care to give Sonia as many personal ghosts as she does historical ones.… Indeed, the novel seems to argue, real growth and connection, both political and personal, cannot begin until everyone’s ghosts have emerged from hiding. Art is, if nothing else, a powerful tool for coaxing them out.”—New York Times Book Review
“Can a work of art act upon the world? In a humanitarian and political crisis, what kind of contribution is a play? These questions rise gradually to the surface in the British Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost . . . Hammad refracts her philosophical inquiry through an elegant assemblage of metatextual layers, filling her novel with plays within plays, works that comment directly on the uses of art.”—Jewish Currents
“Hammad’s novel depicts a strikingly rich and complicated spectrum of Palestinian identity and experience . . . I would say that there is one other kind of recognition taking place in Hammad’s novel, which is neither the recognition of a buried truth nor the recognition of one’s limited knowledge. It’s recognition as addition, as seeing something more: when a familiar text takes on a new life, becomes electric with new meanings. This is what happens, more than once, with the text of Hamlet—the most familiar work in the Western canon, perhaps, into which Hammad so brilliantly breathes new life by staging it as a Palestinian play.”— New York Review of Books
Isabella Hammad is the author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost. The Parisian won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Enter Ghost won the Aspen Words Literary Prize and is shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The winner of the Plimpton Prize for Fiction and an O. Henry Prize, she has been awarded literary fellowships from the Cullman Center, the Lannan Foundation, and the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination.