In Isabella Hammad’s brilliant second novel, Enter Ghost, Sonia Nasir, a London-based actor of Dutch and Palestinian heritage, visits her sister Haneen in Haifa and gets sucked into playing Gertrude in an Arabic-language version of Hamlet being staged in the West Bank. Growing up in England, the sisters’ exposure to Middle East-related drama consisted of nativity plays: ‘straw on the dais of a Hackney church, tea towels pinned with ribbon, We-Three-Kings-Of-Orientar’. Annual family holidays were spent in Haifa, but these visits, Sonia says, were ‘not really a question of return, for us’, as both sisters had been born in Europe. Is it possible to return to a place you’ve never been to? In 1994, after the first intifada, the sisters’ paternal grandmother declares, ‘Even if I cannot live in it, my soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state.’ There is a way to return, both Hamlet and Hammad’s novel suggest. 

Hammad’s strengths as a chronicler of Palestinian history became apparent in her first novel, The Parisian (2019), a passionate, wide-ranging work which takes Midhat, its Nablus-born protagonist, through the early years of the 20th century with empathy, even-handedness and easy-seeming authority. 

‘What do we think the play is about?’ asks the charismatic director, Mariam, in Enter Ghost as the cast completes its first read-through. War, family drama, free will, revenge, death, martyrdom, national liberation – so come the replies. (Add to these acting and artistic responsibility and you have the range