Released when he is 25, he helps found Combatants for Peace, which brings Palestinian and Israeli ex-fighters – among them Elhanan’s son Elik, who introduces the two men – together for dialogue. During his imprisonment, writings by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and friendship with one of the Israeli guards, convince him of the power of nonviolence.

Nineteen years younger than Elhanan, Palestinian Bassam Aramin is jailed aged 17 in 1985 for throwing stones at Israeli occupiers in Hebron, where he grew up living in a cave, a “child of the Nakba”. Although initially reluctant, he subsequently joins the Parents’ Circle, an organisation whose members, from both sides of the divide, have all lost a child in the conflict.Ĭrucially, both men still believe that the Israeli occupation is wrong, and that peace will never be achieved while it exists

In September 1997, his 13-year-old daughter Smadar was killed in a suicide bombing carried out by three Palestinians in Jerusalem. Rami Elhanan (67) on the day in 2016 on which the main narrative takes place, is a “graduate of the Holocaust”, a graphic designer, and an Israeli military veteran. Instead, in what is termed a “hybrid novel” because the two protagonists and their immediate families are real people, and their life experiences actually happened, McCann chooses to bless these peacemakers, both of whom believe that Israelis and Palestinians share “an equity of pain”. However, because he perceives life to be rarely black and white, and because, when you drill down into them, stories can have many sides, his angle of approach is not partisan or polemical. McCann uses this form to grapple with the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel. Colum McCann’s new novel, which takes its title from this figure, is composed of 1001 incantatory factual segments, presumably in homage to A Thousand And One Nights, which range from descriptions of rubber bullet manufacturing to anecdotes about Jorge Luis Borges, from meditations on the flight patterns of migrant birds to musings on the architecture and contents of the mansion of Munib al-Masri, the richest man in Palestine. In geometry, an apeirogon, or infinite polygon, is a shape with an endless but theoretically countable number of sides.

Book apeirogon