Assured and captivating… Ms. Hammad’s acute evocation of place and personality ensures that we are never lost… This agile writer sets us firmly in place, fixing our attention on intersecting lives.”— Wall Street Journal

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Michael Whitmore, the Folger Director. The novelist Isabella Hammad won international acclaim for her first novel, The Parisian, in 2019. BOGAEV: There’s so much in that passage. It tells so much about Sonia. I was reading it thinking, “Oh, she is such an actress. She soaks up all of these impressions. She’s so attuned to the emotional tenor of the people around her.” She’s thinking all of this in a nanosecond. Then she… I just love that opposition of what she’s thinking and what she ends up saying. Enter Ghost takes you deep inside the protagonist’s experience while opening a wider window on to life for Palestinians and their exhausting day-to-day struggles. Hammad explores this setting with intelligence and a fine-grained specificity… A richly layered novel.”— The Guardian Maybe there’s also some way in which this was my own—I don’t know—recuperation of my failure to write about Shakespeare as an undergraduate.In looking at Palestinian existence – and [impulses like] cooperation, coordination, resistance and making beautiful things under the conditions in which they live – theatre made all sorts of things available to me,” Hammad continues. “I wanted the putting on of a play to be an opportunity, a cipher for other kinds of organising as well. One of the elements of the architecture of the Israeli regime is to fragment – and to solidify the fragmentation of – the Palestinian body politic.” Through Enter Ghost’s all-Palestinian heritage ensemble, Hammad explains that “you get a look at the social drama of these different people who have these different political and social experiences and legal statuses, and yet are unified by it.”

Sonia’s fellow actors read Hamlet as an allegory for the Palestinian struggle. Sonia resists this oversimplified interpretation. But in the course of rehearsals, Sonia uncovers ghosts of her own, repressed memories, a family history of resistance, and a newly discovered commitment to the Palestinian cause. Powerful... Enter Ghost is a remarkable work by a novelist who writes about Palestinians with the same love and exasperation that one might feel towards one's family. Literary Review There are multiple layers to this book, as there are multiple types of ghosts being experienced. The ghosts of Hamlet are only the most o And the play...I wasn’t expecting chunks of actual Hamlet to make up the narrative but they do. Not only that but the narrative switches to a play/script format more than once even during scenes where the characters are not rehashing. Maybe this will appeal to others readers, but I found this meta choice to be jarring and not particularly suited to the tone of the narrative.

Enter Ghost

A lyrical meditation on Palestinian endurance, the role of theater as political protest, and the undeniable pull of home." — Booklist Enter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN How now, my lord! I will the king hear this piece of work?

HAMMAD: I mean, teenager, maybe. So, teenager. But then, you know, I studied at university and I found it really hard to study Shakespeare academically. Epic… Because the book takes place in the complicated time and spaces that it does, the narrative grapples with sociopolitical concerns as well as it does the intimate, human ones. It sweeps you along.”— Vanity FairIf the younger generation are female, the older family members are predominantly men, reflecting on the armed struggles of the last fifty years. A divided region and divided families as Uncle and Sonia’s father no longer speak.