At the age of 27, the Palestinian British writer depict wonderfully the period Palestine underwent in the first two decades of the twentieth century , through the thorough and detailed description of Madhat, one of her great grandfather’s history form the moment he left Nablus to Constantinople, then to Mont Pellier & Paris, and back to Nablus again. The novel unfolds through 551 pages, in three Parts, where history, fiction, love, despair, frustrations, uproar, all intermingled in a Balzacian style that did not leave a stone unturned, whether in the phycological sphere of personalities or the historical facts that accompanied the plot and paved the scene for the whole novel. Her Second novel: Enter Ghost,(Genfærd ind-in Danish) 2023, 390 pages,  is another masterpiece of this young talented writer that oblige you to rethink all past events and animate them through vivid and human characterisation. The warm & intense  descriptions by Isabella Hammad of the streets, the cafes, restaurants, theaters-Playing & reviving Hamlet on Ramalla’s stage , contradictory  feelings, angriness, frustrations, family disputes, flowers’ scents , mediterranean waves in Haifa’s sea shore, in Dhaishi camp_ Sonia’s identification with Rasheed’s hunger strike until his death,  or other well known places in all Palestine where past history interchanged and intermingled with nowadays occupation and repression; reminds me of the meticulous approach of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra in “al-Bahth ‘an Waleed Mas’ood-The Search for Waleed Masood”‘s novel, or Elias Khoury’s “Gate of the Sun”-Bab al-Sham”s novel, and their wonderful retrospective reminiscences  of the protagonists’ past. “Hamlet” played by the actors. especially Mariam as a woman who played the role of Hamlet in teh drama, and among open audience near the checkpoint of Qalandiya refugee camp, while settler soldiers regard the play, makes every Palestinian rehearse with Hamlet: “to be or not to be, that is the question”. 

It is an enjoyment to read Isabella’s  marvelous novels and looking ahead for the  third coming novel.    

A  masterpiece fiction that covers the quest of a man for his father, Pedro Paramo, whom he had not seen at all, but following his mother`s wish to go and search after him. After reading the novel & watched the film adaptation of Carlos Velo’s film, Pedro Paramo, in 1967; I realised a great match between Conrad’s ” Heart of Darkness” & Pedro Paramo in their intense poetic narrative, the different layers of connotations of the imagery  employed, and the huge ramifications of their influence on the literary circles of the twentieth century writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote the introduction to the english translation copy recognized the deep effect it had on him to start writing  “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.  Marques wrote:”I could recite the entire book front to back and vice versa without a single appreciable error, I could tell you on which page of my edition each scene could be found, and there wasn’t a single aspect of its characters’ personalities which I wasn’t deeply familier with”- P. x in the forward-.   When he historical and the mythical merge together, masterpieces are the results of such a genre that dominated Latin America’s Hispanic  literature for decades after this innovation.  Marquez was absolute right when hw wrote: “Perdro Paramo is a poetic work of the highest order….it is impossible to be entirely sure where the line between the living and the dead is drawn” . The novel  is “as great and ….enduring, as those of Sophocles” P. xiii