On today's episode, a Palestinian production of Hamlet and the West Bank forms the backdrop for the novel Enter Ghost.

From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger director.

The novelist Isabella Hamad won international acclaim for her first novel, The Parisian, in 2019.

That novel won a slew of prizes, and Granta included Hamad in its decennial best-of-young

British novelist's list earlier this year.

The narrator of Hamad's new novel, Enter Ghost, is Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress who

visits her sister in Israel to recover from the end of a relationship.

Despite wanting to take a break from the stage, Sonia gets roped into playing Gertrude in a

production of Hamlet being mounted in the West Bank.

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. Despite the novel's contemporary setting and political themes, Hamad never lets her character's

trenchant views overwhelm the complex beauty of her storytelling. Here's Isabella Hamad in

conversation with Barbara Bogave. I had read somewhere that you finished your first book, the Parisian, and you were just

writing to find a story, just, you know, seeing what came out of you. And this character,

Sonia, emerged. Is that how, is that true? Yes, exactly. I was on a, on a residency,

and just writing and writing, and I kind of came upon her.

So she's Palestinian, but she's acting in London. She's kind of the air of two literary and political traditions and seen the sort of crossover.

I also at the time was reading Peter Brooks, The Empty Space,

and thinking about different kinds of theatre and their operations,

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