Apeirogon (novel)

Apeirogon is a novel by Colum McCann, published in February 2020. The novel explores the conflict in the Middle East. It follows the story of two men who each lost a daughter. One is Palestinian, the other Israeli.

The story follows two real life figures: Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar who, when he was 17, had been sentenced to a 7 year term of imprisonment for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Consisting of 1001 short sections, the two central figures bond over the violent deaths of their respective daughters. The 14 year old Smadar Elhanan was one of 5 people killed in 1997 as a result of a Hamas suicide bombing attack along the pedestrian mall of Ben Yehuda Street. Abir Aramin, aged 10, died from a gunshot wound to the head fired by an Israeli Border policeman, while she was returning home from school in 'Anata in 2007.

Charles Finch in The Washington Post described the book as "a loving, thoughtful, grueling novel.^[1] Shoiab Alam, writing in The Daily Star, hailed the novel as "a masterful and timely literary response to [the] region's neverending horrors."^[2] However, the international best-selling Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa calls it "Another colonialist misstep in commercial publishing" that "mystifies the colonisation of Palestine as a ‘complicated conflict’ between two equal sides".^[3]