Specters alternates between the stories of Radwa and Shagar: two women born the same day, one a professor of literature, one of history. The novel that results is part fiction, part autobiography, part oral history, part documentary—a metafiction moving between Radwa, who is writing a novel called Specters, and Shagar, whose has written a history, titled Specters, about the 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin. The novel’s structure pays lyrical, compelling tribute to the ideas of the Arab qareen—double or companion, and sometimes demon—and the ancient Egyptian ka, the spirit that is born with and accompanies an individual through life and beyond. Specters unites the projects of history and literature in an evocative, penetrating meditation on the dissolution of boundaries between the personal and the political, on contemporary life in a fractured world.