The novel was nominated for a National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2020, longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 and won the LiBeraturpreis [de] in 2023.

It received a number of translations since: The novel recounts in its first part a historical event,[4] the gang rape and murder of a young Arab Bedouin-Palestinian girl in 1949 by Israeli soldiers in the Negev desert.

[5] Cummins called the book a "highly sophisticated narrative that pitilessly explores the limits of empathy and the desire to right... historical wrongs by giving voice to the voiceless".

[3] Bhutto called Shibli's writing "subtle and sharply observed", concluding that "The book is, at varying points, terrifying and satirical; at every turn, dangerously and devastatingly good".

[5] That year the novel was also reviewed by Katie da Cunha Lewin for the Los Angeles Review of Books, da Cunha Lewin described the book as "an intense and penetrating work about the profound impact of living with violence", concluding that "Shibli’s work is powerful and this translation by Elisabeth Jaquette is rendered with exquisite clarity and quiet control".

Devi summarized the theme as "ostensibly a tale about the banality of brutality and the ability of the powerful to erase the powerless", concluding that the novel and its translation are "extraordinary masterclass in how to do things with words and the lacunae in between".

[14] This has led to a controversy; prompted by the announced cancellation, more than 1,000 authors and intellectuals, including Colm Tóibín, Hisham Matar, Kamila Shamsie, William Dalrymple as well as Nobel prize winners Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk, criticized the Frankfurt Book Fair and wrote in an open letter that the Book Fair had “a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down”.

[18] In his article of 13 October in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, literary scholar and journalist Paul Ingendaay [de] referred to an interview with Shibli that he had already conducted in 2022 on the occasion of the German publication of her novel.

From this, Ingendaay quotes Shibli's statements as a writer who is interested in the literary representation of topics such as control and fear of a person, thereby enabling the author and reader to gain hidden insights about themselves.