We Are All Equally Far from Love begins with a woman falling in love with a man to whom she writes letters, not out of a whim or a choice, but because she is instructed by her boss to do so. Soon they are discussing the weather, and waiting for his letter becomes the most important thing to her. But, one day, they stop coming.

From there the story moves to Afaf, a teenage girl, who works at a local post office and likes letters and keeps them as treasures; a married woman who develops feelings for a physiotherapist that disturbs her conservative life; a shy man who works in a supermarket and cannot bring himself to interact with people; a husband whose desperation to be with his estranged wife leads him to threaten rape; and finally a girl quietly struck by “a tenderness” in her father’s voice for another woman who is not her mother.

The vignettes are so seamlessly tied that one wonders if they are interrelated or separate. The characters overlap with each other in their experiences of love and loneliness and, to an extent, boredom. There is no specific geographical setting (“Palestine” appears only once), which could also be a ploy by the author to escape from the wrath of the war and hide in the inner lives of her protagonists.

Adania Shibli is two-time winner of the Qattan Foundation’s Young Writers’ Award for this work of fiction and her acclaimed novel Touch.

Published in 2012. Translated from the Arabic into English by Paul Starkey.