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London 1989: Michel is an undercover PLO operative hooked on painkillers and posing as a student. He is tasked by mentor Abu-Leila to find a venue for secret Palestinian-Israeli talks. But fellow student Helen, forbidden fruit in this clandestine world, is proving to be a distraction.

Michel is forced to go on the run when he takes possession of a package smuggled out of the Occupied Territories and linked to an assassination in Berlin – a package that both the Israelis and Palestinians are desperate to get a hold of.

From the streets of London, Cambridge and Berlin, to the remotest areas of Scotland, Michel must use his KGB training and Helen’s help to shake off his pursuers and stay one step ahead.
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The New Yorker Best Books of 2012
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I loved Mischa Hiller’s “Shake Off.” I picked it up entirely by accident. I’d never heard of Hiller before, and the book absolutely blew me away. The only thriller this year that even came close was Chris Pavone’s “The Expats,” but Hiller’s novel has the benefit of mining every trope of the thriller genre while being absolutely original at the same time. I will read anything by Hiller from now on.

Malclom Gladwell

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/12/best-books-of-2012.html#ixzz2HQEV9YR6
Publishers Weekly
4th June 2012
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Set at the end of the cold war, Hiller’s beautifully written second novel (after 2010’s Sabra Zoo) chronicles the education of a spy. PLO agent Michel Khoury, who lives in a modest London bedsit but spent his first 15 years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, works for spymaster Abu Leila, who uses him mainly as a courier to shuttle documents from London to East Berlin and back. Now Leila wants his protégé to set up a meeting that will “change the course of history.” Meanwhile, Michel falls for his next-door neighbor, a playful young Englishwoman named Helen, despite a lifetime of keeping strict control over his emotions. Their romance causes increasing difficulties for Michel as he struggles to implement Leila’s instructions and stay true to his cause. A closing twist puts an entirely new perspective on Michel’s life, beliefs, and loyalties. Literary fiction fans will appreciate the sensitive, realistic portrayal of Michel and Helen’s love affair.
The Jordan Times
23rd May 2011
A Roaming Warrior
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This is not the first spy story concocted in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (John Le Carre’s “The Little Drummer Girl” comes to mind), but “Shake Off” is perhaps the first one to ring true from a Palestinian perspective. Due to its genre, “Shake Off” initially seems entirely different from Hiller’s earlier novel, “Sabra Zoo” (Telegram, 2010), but commonalities are soon apparent.

Both books are narrated by a young Palestinian man who grew up in Beirut, and has his own fresh, but committed, take on the Palestinian situation. Each of them leads a double life. Both books are set at a critical historical juncture. While “Sabra Zoo” is a fictionalised, but realistic, account of post-1982 war Beirut and the Sabra-Shatilla massacre, “Shake Off” moves between Cyprus, Moscow, Berlin, London and Beirut, as the Cold War is winding down, and the first Intifada is well underway. Despite not being named in the title, the Sabra massacre is also a major theme in “Shake Off”.

A difference between the two stories is that while Ivan of “Sabra Zoo” only dabbles at love, Michel of “Shake Off” gets involved in a bumpy but passionate affair which turns out to be lifesaving.

Soon after losing his family in the massacre, 15-year-old Michel is recruited by an international operative for the PLO, who facilitates his getting a top-notch education and expert training in clandestine work, including the skills needed to shake off any Israeli agent who might be following him. This rescues Michel from an uncertain future and gives him a purpose in life, yet it doesn’t enable him to shake off the memory of his parents being murdered. “What had happened in Sabra, to my family, had become part of me. They say that a personal tragedy fades over time, but that is just a lie to make you feel better. What happens is that it becomes suffused into your system, more integrated into the everyday fabric of your life.” (p. 46)

Michel keeps a file of clippings on the massacre and its perpetrators, incensed when some of them become ministers in Lebanon, while the Israeli generals also evade responsibility. At times, he longs for revenge, and sees his undercover work for the PLO in this light. He has plenty of money at his disposal, but being a secret agent also has its drawbacks, forcing him to be an outsider. “I’d given up much for a greater cause: I couldn’t mix with certain people, had to deny my origins, couldn’t travel to the place of my birth. I lied to everyone I met and had no real friends.” (pp. 121-2) It is of limited comfort when his superior tells him that all Palestinians are “roaming warriors”. (p. 179)

After a series of secret meetings, and dropping off packages of unknown contents, Michel finally has a mission of which he knows the purpose. He is assigned to make arrangements for a secret meeting in Britain, between Palestinians and sympathetic Israelis - a dialogue aimed to promote a secular, democratic state in all Palestine, and pre-empt the planned Oslo negotiations. When his mission is itself pre-empted by unforeseen events and betrayal, he is left bewildered and utterly alone.

The story is prefaced by an explanation of the word, Intifada, as coming from the Arabic verb that means to shake off, and connecting it to the uprising in the occupied territories. In the plot, shaking off is connected to Michel’s trajectory. While he has the know-how to lose Israeli agents who are on his trail, he is not prepared for threats from within. Used to following orders blindly, he must now make his own personal Intifada, shaking off previous dependencies and finding a new way to serve his people and be true to himself.

In “Shake Off”, Hiller successfully mixes the suspense and fast pace of a spy story with a set of complex, compelling characters and unexpected situations. As such, he goes beyond the spy genre to cover important issues related to the Palestinian cause, as well as a number of troubling questions. Despite the understated way in which Michel tells his story, his voice is also a cry of simmering rage against injustice. “Shake Off” will soon be available at the University Bookshop.

The Saudi Gazette
3rd April 2011
A Novelist Goes Undercover (Review & Interview)
Reviewed by Susannah Tarbush
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The Palestinian-British novelist Mischa Hiller is making quite an impact on the literary scene these days. His 2010 debut novel “Sabra Zoo” recently won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel for the Europe and South Asia region. At the same time the London publisher Telegram has published his second novel, a spy thriller entitled “Shake Off”, to much critical praise.
Following the prize, “Sabra Zoo” is now in the running for the overall Commonwealth First Novel prize, in competition with the winners of the First Novel prizes in the three other Commonwealth regions – Africa; Canada and the Caribbean; and South East Asia and Pacific. The winner of the £5,000 prize will be announced on May 21 at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. So far, one translation of “Sabra Zoo” has appeared: an Italian edition issued by Rome-based publisher Newton Compton under the title “Fuga dall’inferno. Una storia palestinese”.

“Sabra Zoo” is set in Beirut during the Israeli siege of summer 1982. Its horrific climax is the massacre of hundreds, or thousands, of defenseless Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Warmth and vitality are breathed into this dark setting through the novel’s appealing Palestinian-Danish first-person narrator, 18-year old Ivan. As well as working as an interpreter in a hospital with a multinational staff, Ivan is a fixer for the foreign media and a courier of forged documents and passports between PLO operatives.

The protagonist and narrator of “Shake Off” is a Palestinian in his early twenties, Michel Khoury, whose PLO mentor and handler Abu Leila has sent him to London as an undercover operative. It is 1989, and Michel is enrolled as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as a cover. He lives in a basic bedsit in the Tufnell Park area of North London.

Michel was orphaned at the age of 15 when Phalangists massacred his family in Sabra camp in 1982. He is intelligent and quick-witted, with an acute eye for the ridiculous. But he is also isolated, keeping his distance from others in case his cover is blown. His addiction to codeine painkillers is one sign of his lasting trauma.
Michel constantly puts his KGB training into action as he juggles multiple identities, shifts and hides large amounts of cash, liaises with go-betweens to the Occupied Territories, sends coded messages to Abu Leila in Berlin – and tries to shake off anyone who might be following him.
Abu-Leila wants to host a secret meeting in England between Palestinians and Israelis to discuss a secular, democratic, one-state solution and to pre-empt talks planned for Norway (which would ultimately lead to the 1993 Oslo agreement). He asks Michel to find a venue, and Michel suggests Cambridge.

Michel jokingly refers to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad as “the competition”; in reality, “the idea of PLO security competing with such an organization was laughable”. When a package from the Occupied Territories comes into Michel’s hands he is aware that “the competition” is shadowing him. Certain Palestinian elements are also interested in the package. Michel goes on the run to Scotland with Helen, a fellow occupant of his house with whom he has become involved. “Shake Off” is ingeniously plotted and skillfully paced, and interlaces compelling human stories with political espionage. The suspense builds until the very end.

Hiller was born in England in 1962. He grew up in London, Dar es Salaam and Beirut, and now lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife and children. He has concentrated on writing fiction since having to give up his full time work as an Information Systems Manager because he suffers from the debilitating illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). (Mischa Hiller was interviewed via email)

What does winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize mean to you, and how important is it to you that the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre is commemorated in this way?

It came as a complete surprise to win the regional award and it is a great boost to a writer to be acknowledged in this way. Part of the satisfaction of winning is that it puts the events in “Sabra Zoo” on the English-speaking literary map, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, so this accolade is very important to me in that respect.

Has winning the prize had discernible effects so far, for example in expanding the readership of “Sabra Zoo”?
Yes, there has been renewed interest in “Sabra Zoo”, as a result of both the Commonwealth award and the publication of “Shake Off”.

The current phase of Arab revolution has led to discussion of the role of fiction in giving insights. Do you feel a sense of mission in reminding us of Palestinian history?

Fiction has an important role to play in conveying the effects of injustice, particularly on the personal level, although the only mission I feel I am on is to tell a good story. Having said that, there are certain things you want to say as a writer, or to bring attention to, like I did in “Sabra Zoo”, but it has to be wrapped up in something palatable to the reader. Nobody wants to read anything polemical or dishonest.

Why did you decide to move into the literary spy fiction field with “Shake Off”, and what challenges did writing it pose?

The quick answer is that I enjoy thrillers, so I wanted to try to write one. It goes back to what I said about making things palatable to the reader, and a thriller makes a good vehicle for politics. Writing a thriller does present its own set of problems, and there are certain genre expectations that must be met, so plotting has to be more carefully done.

Where did you obtain the knowledge which provided a basis for Michel’s KGB training and his grooming by Abu Leila? It all has the ring of authenticity.
I’m obviously pleased it rings true! The secret is lots of research and talking to the right people.

Michel is an intriguing character. Is he based on anyone you know, and why did you decide to make him a Christian (albeit a non-drinking one)?
I deliberately made him a Christian because I wanted to subvert the expectation that all Palestinians are Muslims, and at the same time make him even more of an outsider, even back at home in the camps. The only thing I have in common with Michel is that as a student I lived in a similar bedsit at the same time in London, and we are both teetotal!

In 2009 you won the European Independent Film Festival script competition for the screen adaptation of “Sabra Zoo”. Are you also going to write a script for “Shake Off”?

There has always been sporadic interest in “Sabra Zoo” as a film, and this has renewed recently, but it has yet to be optioned. I would like nothing better than to have these events immortalized on film. I was told that people in the Beirut camps were watching “Waltz with Bashir” (despite it being banned in Lebanon) because it touched on their experience – imagine their delight if a film were made that showed what happened to them center stage. But a lot of things have to fall into place for a film to happen. I do plan to adapt “Shake Off”, and it could be that it would be an easier (ie cheaper) film to make than “Sabra Zoo”.

At a time when marketing and hype play a big part – some would argue too big a part – in presenting new authors to the public, you have a relatively low public profile. Do you intend to raise your profile at all in terms of eg appearances at literary festivals here or abroad?

Ill health prevents me from doing a lot of this sort of thing even if I wanted to, which I don’t particularly. I am a strong believer in the work speaking for itself, and feel no desire to take the limelight, even though, as you say, it seems to be expected. A lot of writers like it, and are very engaging, but some writers should just stick to writing. However, I am always pleased to know that my books are being appreciated and I love to hear directly from readers and be interviewed about my writing!

What are you working on at the moment – and will Palestine remain at the core of your novel writing?
What I am writing now has nothing to do with Palestine (although there is a minor character in it who is Palestinian!) and I am keen not to be pigeonholed as a writer. That doesn’t mean I won’t return to the topic.
Haaretz
3rd April 2011
Suspense / Knowing the enemy (double review of Sabra Zoo & Shake Off)
Reviewed by Ina Friedman
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Given the walls, literal and metaphorical, that have risen up between Israelis and Palestinians, especially during the last two decades, literature is one of the few channels through which we can get a sense of what life is like on the other side of the conflict. The canon of Palestinian fiction is relatively small, especially in terms of works translated into English. Now, however, we can add to its list of practitioners debut novelist Mischa Hiller, of Palestinian and British parentage, who was raised in London, Beirut and the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.

Given Hiller's hyphenated roots, it should not be surprising that the issue of identity, and the loyalties that follow from it, are leitmotifs of both his works: one about a teenager who must decide where his cardinal duty lies; the other about a young man living under a false identity who longs to regain his sense of self. And both protagonists, as it happens, are second-generation diaspora Palestinians cursed by the conflict over a land they've never seen.

'A citizen of the world'
Eighteen-year-old Ivan, the narrator of "Sabra Zoo" (the first of Hiller's two novels, published last year ), grew up in Denmark and Beirut as the son of a Danish mother and Palestinian father of whom we learn little beyond the fact that he is highly respected by his PLO comrades. When asked by a European woman whether he considers himself Danish or Arab, the teen declaims, "I am a citizen of the world," adding for our benefit: "I thought this sounded better than 'I don't know' or 'It depends on who I'm with' or 'Who gives a shit anyway?'"

We meet Ivan in Beirut just after his parents have left the city in the late-August 1982 exodus of PLO leaders and fighters, which was Israel's price for halting its aerial and artillery assaults on West Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila to its south. Ivan could have gone with them, but he was persuaded by a PLO elder to stay in the city because he could be useful to the cause. "At the time it had seemed like a good idea, an opportunity to prove that I could do something worthwhile and be self-reliant for the first time," he recalls. "My mother hadn't been so keen on my staying but the truth was I saw it as a way of escaping my parents ..."

Thus, while his Lebanese former classmates begin their university studies, Ivan works as an interpreter for a number of foreign medical volunteers - physicians and physical therapists from India, Norway and Scotland - in Sabra's hospital.

Occasionally he helps out an American television journalist. And protected (or so he hopes ) by his Danish passport, he also serves as a courier for the remnant of the PLO cadre operating underground. Free of parental supervision, he spends his nights in the company of the volunteers and a few of their male Palestinian friends, drinking, getting stoned and being initiated into sex. All in all, the perfect setup for a bildungsroman against an intriguing historical backdrop.

From Ivan's perspective, the war has reached its denouement. Israeli troops still have the city surrounded. But with the PLO evicted, the bombing and shelling have stopped, and Ivan's life - except for an occasional spike in adrenalin related to his clandestine duties - has settled into a quotidian round of work and play. Even the war injuries he confronts in the Sabra hospital don't seem to rattle him. Unlike our narrator, however, we know that the worst - a paroxysm of carnage committed by the Christian Phalange militia in Sabra and Chatila - is yet to come. Indeed, Hiller's publisher describes the novel as the flip (that is, Palestinian ) side of Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir." And though "Sabra Zoo" lacks that film's psychological depth and hallmark surrealism, the comparison is not unwarranted.

The description of what Ivan sees in Sabra after the massacre is graphic and appropriately harrowing. But it is Hiller's restraint in describing the Israeli soldiers' protestations that they were clueless about the massacre going on in the camps - which they had surrounded to block entry or escape - that best testifies to his mettle as a novelist. Here would be just the place to give free rein to Palestinian fury. I, for one, was expecting a rant to emerge from one character or another. Instead, the narration remains modulated and focused on the march of events as the medical volunteers begin to go their separate ways, and Ivan must choose between staying put for the sake of the cause or fleeing to a haven of safety and stability.

Don't bet you can guess what he chooses.

Classic thriller ingredients:

The tale told by narrator Michel Khoury in Hiller's "Shake Off" (2011 ) picks up chronologically where Ivan's leaves off. Orphaned by the massacre in Sabra, in which he too nearly lost his life, the teenaged Michel is placed with an elderly, childless Palestinian couple - Christians, like himself - in West Beirut. There he is visited by a man he comes to know only as Abu Leila, a shadowy but kindly figure who cultivates the traumatized boy and expands his horizons by introducing him to the works of leading Arab writers and even to books about the Holocaust, so as to better "know the enemy." Equally seductive is Abu Leila's intimation that he will help Michel pursue a path to avenge his parents' murder.

All this we learn in flashbacks, for when we meet Michel it is 1989 and he is a PLO undercover agent in London posing as a student. Trained in the rigors of spy craft (with which the book is replete ), among the advantages he brings to his job is a chameleon-like quality that enables him to "be taken for either Swiss or Lebanese" (the nationalities of two of the false passports he possesses ). Indeed, we're told, he has also been mistaken for "French, Italian, Greek and even Israeli." Abu Leila, whom Michel has come to regard as his "mentor and surrogate father," is now his handler. With the exception of a London-based Palestinian who occasionally serves as a courier to and from the West Bank, Abu Leila is also Michel's sole contact in the PLO's compartmentalized network.

To assuage his haunting memories, Michel has become addicted to codeine. And to ease his profound loneliness, he allows himself to become emotionally involved with Helen, a graduate student in his rooming house, though he's gnawed by the suspicion that she's cheating on him. Deception, if that is indeed Helen's game, is mutual, of course, as Michel is hardly whom he appears to be. Soon after their affair begins, he wonders whether it would be possible to have more than a sexual relationship with Helen. "The reality was that the attraction of having a relationship was in part telling her about my life, sharing its burdens," he confides. But Michel understands that the obstacles to revealing himself to a woman "were big, not least of all Abu Leila, to whom it would be a betrayal."

In contrast to Hiller's first novel, "Shake Off" is styled as a classic thriller boasting all the ingredients of that genre. The noir-like flat, clipped sentences of Michel's narrative keep the pace going even when the tension generated by the plot occasionally wanes. And in the best le Carre tradition, Michel's being in touch with feelings he's not free to act upon engages our sentiments all the more. As to his immediate plight, suffice it to say that as the saga unfolds Michel finds himself on the run, after coming into possession of a packet smuggled out of the West Bank for which one man has already been murdered. Whether out of naivete, fear or sheer discipline, he delays opening the envelope for which he is risking his life. When its contents are finally revealed to him, at the climax of a chase across Britain, Michel discovers that he's been living a lie in more ways than he knew.

As the first Lebanon war, or "Operation Peace for Galilee," as it was then called, took place before the days of satellite news stations and the Internet, Israelis on the home front could only imagine its impact on the residents of besieged Beirut. As I recall, the standard shot of the hostilities shown on Israel's sole and government-controlled TV station was of black smoke billowing up from somewhere behind a distant mountain ridge. These novels not only bring home what it felt like on the receiving end of Israel's "long arm" and misbegotten alliance with the Phalange but, by focusing on diaspora refugees, inevitably remind us that the geopolitical scope of the "Palestinian problem" extends beyond the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hiller, who is 49, brings to his works not only a craftsman's skill but also a compassion for his characters that proves infectious. He is no propagandist, however. True, the sinister presence of Israelis hovers over both these novels, as wanton invaders in the first and relentless hunters in the second. But with one exception, as actual characters who interact with the protagonists, Israelis have only cameo roles, so that the sting we feel at perceiving our compatriots as the "bad guys" is brief. Be forewarned, though: The depth of the cruelty practiced by that one exception is stunning.
The Daily Telegraph
29th March 2011

Michel is a Lebanese orphan of the 1982 refugee camp killings that inspired Mischa Hiller’s prize-winning debut, Sabra Zoo. Seven years on, he’s a haunted, pill-popping PLO agent juggling a forbidden lover, a murdered mentor, a mysterious package and an urgent need to flee both his own side and Mossad. Melancholy and dreamlike, Hiller’s neat upending of conventions movingly captures the realpolitik of a conflict perpetuated by the shared interests of enemies.
The Economist
26th Feb. 2011
Hard to Shake Off - A shrewd espionage thriller
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A BEDSIT in Tufnell Park, an unremarkable suburb of north London, seems an unlikely setting for an espionage thriller about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until the hero, Michel, who is a survivor of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, takes out a bundle of fake passports and foreign currency from a secret alcove in the bathroom and goes to work.

Mischa Hiller’s debut, “Sabra Zoo”, a chilling rites-of-passage novel set in Beirut in 1982 during the killings in the camps, was highly praised. “Shake Off” builds on that success. The book sweeps the reader straight into the deadly world of an operative, where everyday objects and events are weapons and battlefields in the undercover war. As every good thriller should try to do, “Shake Off” is peppered with expert tradecraft: how to hide money in a rolled-up newspaper, how wet paper is easier to flush away than dry.

But “Shake Off” is more than a straightforward spy thriller. Mr Hiller’s book is both poignant and human. As Michel tries to cope with loss and grief, memories erupt like a volcano, such as his father pushing him over as the gunmen open fire—and then slowly expiring on top of him. Not surprisingly, Michel has become a junkie who cannot sleep unless he first swallows a handful of codeine tablets. Charged by his handler, Abu Leila, with finding a secret venue for talks between Israelis and Palestinians, Michel also reads Primo Levi, where he finds dark echoes of what happened to him in Lebanon.

“Shake Off” is written in the first person, and Mr Hiller, who grew up in Beirut, London and Dar es Salaam, has a unique and engaging voice. The book’s narrow focus intensifies both the narrative drama and Michel’s inner desolation. Mr Hiller’s writing style is sparse but evocative; the hero’s bare room and the loneliness of exile deftly drawn. Words are used sparingly and effectively; the Phalangists don’t burst in that fateful night, they “interrupt” Michel’s family’s final dinner.

The menace builds steadily until a brutal assassination in Berlin, after which Michel, tracked by Mossad, goes on the run to the highlands of Scotland. Only Helen, his feisty neighbour, with whom he has formed a close bond, can offer some kind of salvation. Forced to use her as a kind of sanctuary, he endangers the woman he loves. Powerful and thought-provoking, this is a book that stays with the reader. Mr Hiller’s “Shake Off” is hard to shake off.

http://www.economist.com/node/18226565?story_id=18226565

Fiction Uncovered
Reviewed by Ashley Stokes
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Mischa Hiller’s 2010 novel Sabra Zoo ended with its protagonist Ivan morally disabused on an outward-bound flight from Beirut after he witnesses at firsthand the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the mass murder of Palestinian civilians by Israeli-sponsored neo-fascists in 1982. This still-little known atrocity casts a long shadow over his second novel, Shake Off (Telegram Books).

It is now 1989 and Michel Khoury, the sole-surviving member of a family killed at Sabra is a PLO secret agent living undercover in London bedsit-land. Trained by the Soviets in the arts of espionage and shuttling between West Berlin, Switzerland and Athens at the bidding of his mentor Abu Leila, Michel has a plethora of aliases, a deep-seated commitment to the cause and an addiction to Codeine that suggests a more profound identity crisis than mere exile. While Michel is supposed to be organizing a secret conference to discuss a radical solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the surety of his clandestine life is unsettled by an affair with Helen, his sexy, directionless neighbour, herself trying to detach herself from her PhD supervisor, a sleazy Greek drunk Michel calls ‘Zorba’. When a mysterious package smuggled out of the West Bank comes into Michel’s hands, he begins to realize he’s being followed by ‘The Competition’: Mossad agents. After an assassination in Berlin, ‘The Competition’ work out where Michel lives, sending him and Helen on a cat-and-mouse trip across England and Scotland and towards a brilliantly delivered twist-ending and a return to the world of Lebanese refugee camps.

Shake Off is an expertly constructed, serpentine and suspenseful novel that alternates between driven hide-and-seek sequences and numb meditations. It’s beautifully atmospheric too, and a low-rent London of dank bedsits and grey institutional buildings becomes a palpable presence (the only false note of period detail being that the Waterstones in Gower Street where Michel buys a Primo Levi book was still a Dillons as late as 1995). Michel himself is the PLO equivalent to the existential misfit foot soldier found in Le Carre’s Smiley novels, Graham Greene’s The Human Factor or the Harry Palmer series, ‘part of a grander plan that [calls] for sacrifice and putting [his] own interests last’, an expendable pawn in a chess game that he begins to realize is no more than a too-frequently canted metaphor. The title comes from the literal Arabic for Intifada. There is much more here than the perceived Zionist oppressor for Michel to shake-off.

Shake Off is more emphatically a genre novel than Sabra Zoo but one that continues in the vein of that novel’s complexity, compassion and ability to disturb the recent past without resort to sentimentality or soapboxing.
The Independent
23rd Feb. 2011
PLO drama smuggles in the thrills
Reviewed by Lucy Popescu
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Mischa Hiller's assured debut, Sabra Zoo, concerned the 1982 massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. These horrific acts provide the backdrop to his follow-up novel, Shake Off, and are the catalyst for his young protagonist Michel's induction as an undercover PLO operative.

The novel opens in 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall comes down. Michel, trained by the KGB, is posing as a student and living in London. Although loyal to the cause, he suffers from post-traumatic stress after witnessing the brutal murder of his family and has an addiction to codeine.

Michel's primary contact and mentor, the enigmatic Abu-Leila, has charged him with finding a UK venue for secret Palestinian-Israeli talks. But when Abu-Leila is assassinated in Berlin, Michel is forced on the run, unwittingly in possession of a package that has been smuggled out of the Occupied Territories. Pursued by both the Israelis and Palestinians, Michel is forced to seek the help of Helen, a fellow student and neighbour, with whom he has become romantically involved.

Some readers may be initially put off by the detailed descriptions of the world of espionage – the coding and decoding of messages, the surreal conversations in public phone booths, the dead-letter drops, the modified luggage for smuggling packages and the art of picking locks. There are also some unconvincing plot-lines, such as Michel's reluctance to know the contents of the package. But in the second half of Shake Off, when Michel is trailed through the streets of London and Cambridge to a remote corner of Scotland, Hiller ratchets up the pace in the best thriller tradition.

Hiller certainly knows his stuff and the various intrigues of his agents and double-agents are entirely credible. The use of Canadian passports by Israeli agents recalls the Mossad's misuse of British passports in Dubai last year. Hiller is also admirably measured in his account of the passions, betrayalss and hypocrisies on both sides.

Shake Off is something of a slow burn, but Hiller tackles complex issues with sensitivity and his portrait of a traumatised survivor is also deeply affecting. As such, Shake Off is a satisfying read and a clever thriller. Hiller's second novel is more than enough proof that this British-Palestinian writer is an upcoming talent to watch.
The Fiction Desk
24th Feb. 2011
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Regular readers of this blog might remember my review of Sabra Zoo, Mischa Hiller‘s excellent debut novel based around the 1982 massacre in Sabra Camp. I concluded that review by saying how much I was looking forward to Hiller’s next book.

Well, his next book is here now, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Shake Off is set in 1989 and is narrated by Michel, a young PLO agent living undercover in London as a student. Sabra rears its head here, too: Michel is both a victim and a creation of that event, which claimed the lives of his family and led to his adoption by a PLO operative who arranged his education and later his training in espionage. Now he lives alone in a bedsit, addicted to painkillers and shunning human contact. His life, from what he does to how he lives, has essentially become a complex coping mechanism for his past. The enforced solitude and paranoia of his work create a noise that blocks out the past from his days in the same way the codeine gets him through the nights:

"So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its counter-surveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off."

But while Michel is good at what he does—and we get plenty of insights into the tricks of his trade—he is still an unwitting pawn, and the comparison that kept coming to mind was Alfred Hitchcock. Michel is very much a Hitchcock innocent, drawn into a murky underworld that he shouldn’t have anything to do with—even if that drawing-in has taken place years before the story is set. The story too has a Hitchcockian feel to it: the tense but witty set-pieces involving counter-espionage in Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road, or the move from the London of the opening chapters to a climax set in the wilds of Scotland. The novel as a whole feels like one of Hitchcock’s better films, and I doubt that the cinematic appeal of the book is entirely coincidental. Hiller certainly knows his cinema—his screenplay for Sabra Zoo won the European Independent Film Festival script competition.

That said, it doesn’t do this book justice to simply praise it as a cinematic book, or an embryonic movie. The writing is strong and confident, even when the narrator is not: Michel and his world are vividly evoked. Hiller is, I think, an excellent writer. Sabra Zoo went down well, and Shake Off is getting positive reviews absolutely everywhere. Well-written enough to please the serious reader, and fast-paced and engaging enough for the beach (if summer ever comes), Shake Off deserves to do very well.

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/blog/shake-off-by-mischa-hiller/
Publishers Weekly
4th June 2012
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Set at the end of the cold war, Hiller’s beautifully written second novel (after 2010’s Sabra Zoo) chronicles the education of a spy. PLO agent Michel Khoury, who lives in a modest London bedsit but spent his first 15 years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, works for spymaster Abu Leila, who uses him mainly as a courier to shuttle documents from London to East Berlin and back. Now Leila wants his protégé to set up a meeting that will “change the course of history.” Meanwhile, Michel falls for his next-door neighbor, a playful young Englishwoman named Helen, despite a lifetime of keeping strict control over his emotions. Their romance causes increasing difficulties for Michel as he struggles to implement Leila’s instructions and stay true to his cause. A closing twist puts an entirely new perspective on Michel’s life, beliefs, and loyalties. Literary fiction fans will appreciate the sensitive, realistic portrayal of Michel and Helen’s love affair.
The Jordan Times
23rd May 2011
A Roaming Warrior
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This is not the first spy story concocted in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (John Le Carre’s “The Little Drummer Girl” comes to mind), but “Shake Off” is perhaps the first one to ring true from a Palestinian perspective. Due to its genre, “Shake Off” initially seems entirely different from Hiller’s earlier novel, “Sabra Zoo” (Telegram, 2010), but commonalities are soon apparent.

Both books are narrated by a young Palestinian man who grew up in Beirut, and has his own fresh, but committed, take on the Palestinian situation. Each of them leads a double life. Both books are set at a critical historical juncture. While “Sabra Zoo” is a fictionalised, but realistic, account of post-1982 war Beirut and the Sabra-Shatilla massacre, “Shake Off” moves between Cyprus, Moscow, Berlin, London and Beirut, as the Cold War is winding down, and the first Intifada is well underway. Despite not being named in the title, the Sabra massacre is also a major theme in “Shake Off”.

A difference between the two stories is that while Ivan of “Sabra Zoo” only dabbles at love, Michel of “Shake Off” gets involved in a bumpy but passionate affair which turns out to be lifesaving.

Soon after losing his family in the massacre, 15-year-old Michel is recruited by an international operative for the PLO, who facilitates his getting a top-notch education and expert training in clandestine work, including the skills needed to shake off any Israeli agent who might be following him. This rescues Michel from an uncertain future and gives him a purpose in life, yet it doesn’t enable him to shake off the memory of his parents being murdered. “What had happened in Sabra, to my family, had become part of me. They say that a personal tragedy fades over time, but that is just a lie to make you feel better. What happens is that it becomes suffused into your system, more integrated into the everyday fabric of your life.” (p. 46)

Michel keeps a file of clippings on the massacre and its perpetrators, incensed when some of them become ministers in Lebanon, while the Israeli generals also evade responsibility. At times, he longs for revenge, and sees his undercover work for the PLO in this light. He has plenty of money at his disposal, but being a secret agent also has its drawbacks, forcing him to be an outsider. “I’d given up much for a greater cause: I couldn’t mix with certain people, had to deny my origins, couldn’t travel to the place of my birth. I lied to everyone I met and had no real friends.” (pp. 121-2) It is of limited comfort when his superior tells him that all Palestinians are “roaming warriors”. (p. 179)

After a series of secret meetings, and dropping off packages of unknown contents, Michel finally has a mission of which he knows the purpose. He is assigned to make arrangements for a secret meeting in Britain, between Palestinians and sympathetic Israelis - a dialogue aimed to promote a secular, democratic state in all Palestine, and pre-empt the planned Oslo negotiations. When his mission is itself pre-empted by unforeseen events and betrayal, he is left bewildered and utterly alone.

The story is prefaced by an explanation of the word, Intifada, as coming from the Arabic verb that means to shake off, and connecting it to the uprising in the occupied territories. In the plot, shaking off is connected to Michel’s trajectory. While he has the know-how to lose Israeli agents who are on his trail, he is not prepared for threats from within. Used to following orders blindly, he must now make his own personal Intifada, shaking off previous dependencies and finding a new way to serve his people and be true to himself.

In “Shake Off”, Hiller successfully mixes the suspense and fast pace of a spy story with a set of complex, compelling characters and unexpected situations. As such, he goes beyond the spy genre to cover important issues related to the Palestinian cause, as well as a number of troubling questions. Despite the understated way in which Michel tells his story, his voice is also a cry of simmering rage against injustice. “Shake Off” will soon be available at the University Bookshop.

The Saudi Gazette
3rd April 2011
A Novelist Goes Undercover (Review & Interview)
Reviewed by Susannah Tarbush
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The Palestinian-British novelist Mischa Hiller is making quite an impact on the literary scene these days. His 2010 debut novel “Sabra Zoo” recently won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel for the Europe and South Asia region. At the same time the London publisher Telegram has published his second novel, a spy thriller entitled “Shake Off”, to much critical praise.
Following the prize, “Sabra Zoo” is now in the running for the overall Commonwealth First Novel prize, in competition with the winners of the First Novel prizes in the three other Commonwealth regions – Africa; Canada and the Caribbean; and South East Asia and Pacific. The winner of the £5,000 prize will be announced on May 21 at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. So far, one translation of “Sabra Zoo” has appeared: an Italian edition issued by Rome-based publisher Newton Compton under the title “Fuga dall’inferno. Una storia palestinese”.

“Sabra Zoo” is set in Beirut during the Israeli siege of summer 1982. Its horrific climax is the massacre of hundreds, or thousands, of defenseless Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Warmth and vitality are breathed into this dark setting through the novel’s appealing Palestinian-Danish first-person narrator, 18-year old Ivan. As well as working as an interpreter in a hospital with a multinational staff, Ivan is a fixer for the foreign media and a courier of forged documents and passports between PLO operatives.

The protagonist and narrator of “Shake Off” is a Palestinian in his early twenties, Michel Khoury, whose PLO mentor and handler Abu Leila has sent him to London as an undercover operative. It is 1989, and Michel is enrolled as a student at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) as a cover. He lives in a basic bedsit in the Tufnell Park area of North London.

Michel was orphaned at the age of 15 when Phalangists massacred his family in Sabra camp in 1982. He is intelligent and quick-witted, with an acute eye for the ridiculous. But he is also isolated, keeping his distance from others in case his cover is blown. His addiction to codeine painkillers is one sign of his lasting trauma.
Michel constantly puts his KGB training into action as he juggles multiple identities, shifts and hides large amounts of cash, liaises with go-betweens to the Occupied Territories, sends coded messages to Abu Leila in Berlin – and tries to shake off anyone who might be following him.
Abu-Leila wants to host a secret meeting in England between Palestinians and Israelis to discuss a secular, democratic, one-state solution and to pre-empt talks planned for Norway (which would ultimately lead to the 1993 Oslo agreement). He asks Michel to find a venue, and Michel suggests Cambridge.

Michel jokingly refers to the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad as “the competition”; in reality, “the idea of PLO security competing with such an organization was laughable”. When a package from the Occupied Territories comes into Michel’s hands he is aware that “the competition” is shadowing him. Certain Palestinian elements are also interested in the package. Michel goes on the run to Scotland with Helen, a fellow occupant of his house with whom he has become involved. “Shake Off” is ingeniously plotted and skillfully paced, and interlaces compelling human stories with political espionage. The suspense builds until the very end.

Hiller was born in England in 1962. He grew up in London, Dar es Salaam and Beirut, and now lives in Cambridge, England, with his wife and children. He has concentrated on writing fiction since having to give up his full time work as an Information Systems Manager because he suffers from the debilitating illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). (Mischa Hiller was interviewed via email)

What does winning the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize mean to you, and how important is it to you that the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre is commemorated in this way?

It came as a complete surprise to win the regional award and it is a great boost to a writer to be acknowledged in this way. Part of the satisfaction of winning is that it puts the events in “Sabra Zoo” on the English-speaking literary map, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, so this accolade is very important to me in that respect.

Has winning the prize had discernible effects so far, for example in expanding the readership of “Sabra Zoo”?
Yes, there has been renewed interest in “Sabra Zoo”, as a result of both the Commonwealth award and the publication of “Shake Off”.

The current phase of Arab revolution has led to discussion of the role of fiction in giving insights. Do you feel a sense of mission in reminding us of Palestinian history?

Fiction has an important role to play in conveying the effects of injustice, particularly on the personal level, although the only mission I feel I am on is to tell a good story. Having said that, there are certain things you want to say as a writer, or to bring attention to, like I did in “Sabra Zoo”, but it has to be wrapped up in something palatable to the reader. Nobody wants to read anything polemical or dishonest.

Why did you decide to move into the literary spy fiction field with “Shake Off”, and what challenges did writing it pose?

The quick answer is that I enjoy thrillers, so I wanted to try to write one. It goes back to what I said about making things palatable to the reader, and a thriller makes a good vehicle for politics. Writing a thriller does present its own set of problems, and there are certain genre expectations that must be met, so plotting has to be more carefully done.

Where did you obtain the knowledge which provided a basis for Michel’s KGB training and his grooming by Abu Leila? It all has the ring of authenticity.
I’m obviously pleased it rings true! The secret is lots of research and talking to the right people.

Michel is an intriguing character. Is he based on anyone you know, and why did you decide to make him a Christian (albeit a non-drinking one)?
I deliberately made him a Christian because I wanted to subvert the expectation that all Palestinians are Muslims, and at the same time make him even more of an outsider, even back at home in the camps. The only thing I have in common with Michel is that as a student I lived in a similar bedsit at the same time in London, and we are both teetotal!

In 2009 you won the European Independent Film Festival script competition for the screen adaptation of “Sabra Zoo”. Are you also going to write a script for “Shake Off”?

There has always been sporadic interest in “Sabra Zoo” as a film, and this has renewed recently, but it has yet to be optioned. I would like nothing better than to have these events immortalized on film. I was told that people in the Beirut camps were watching “Waltz with Bashir” (despite it being banned in Lebanon) because it touched on their experience – imagine their delight if a film were made that showed what happened to them center stage. But a lot of things have to fall into place for a film to happen. I do plan to adapt “Shake Off”, and it could be that it would be an easier (ie cheaper) film to make than “Sabra Zoo”.

At a time when marketing and hype play a big part – some would argue too big a part – in presenting new authors to the public, you have a relatively low public profile. Do you intend to raise your profile at all in terms of eg appearances at literary festivals here or abroad?

Ill health prevents me from doing a lot of this sort of thing even if I wanted to, which I don’t particularly. I am a strong believer in the work speaking for itself, and feel no desire to take the limelight, even though, as you say, it seems to be expected. A lot of writers like it, and are very engaging, but some writers should just stick to writing. However, I am always pleased to know that my books are being appreciated and I love to hear directly from readers and be interviewed about my writing!

What are you working on at the moment – and will Palestine remain at the core of your novel writing?
What I am writing now has nothing to do with Palestine (although there is a minor character in it who is Palestinian!) and I am keen not to be pigeonholed as a writer. That doesn’t mean I won’t return to the topic.
Haaretz
3rd April 2011
Suspense / Knowing the enemy (double review of Sabra Zoo & Shake Off)
Reviewed by Ina Friedman
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Given the walls, literal and metaphorical, that have risen up between Israelis and Palestinians, especially during the last two decades, literature is one of the few channels through which we can get a sense of what life is like on the other side of the conflict. The canon of Palestinian fiction is relatively small, especially in terms of works translated into English. Now, however, we can add to its list of practitioners debut novelist Mischa Hiller, of Palestinian and British parentage, who was raised in London, Beirut and the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam.

Given Hiller's hyphenated roots, it should not be surprising that the issue of identity, and the loyalties that follow from it, are leitmotifs of both his works: one about a teenager who must decide where his cardinal duty lies; the other about a young man living under a false identity who longs to regain his sense of self. And both protagonists, as it happens, are second-generation diaspora Palestinians cursed by the conflict over a land they've never seen.

'A citizen of the world'
Eighteen-year-old Ivan, the narrator of "Sabra Zoo" (the first of Hiller's two novels, published last year ), grew up in Denmark and Beirut as the son of a Danish mother and Palestinian father of whom we learn little beyond the fact that he is highly respected by his PLO comrades. When asked by a European woman whether he considers himself Danish or Arab, the teen declaims, "I am a citizen of the world," adding for our benefit: "I thought this sounded better than 'I don't know' or 'It depends on who I'm with' or 'Who gives a shit anyway?'"

We meet Ivan in Beirut just after his parents have left the city in the late-August 1982 exodus of PLO leaders and fighters, which was Israel's price for halting its aerial and artillery assaults on West Beirut and the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila to its south. Ivan could have gone with them, but he was persuaded by a PLO elder to stay in the city because he could be useful to the cause. "At the time it had seemed like a good idea, an opportunity to prove that I could do something worthwhile and be self-reliant for the first time," he recalls. "My mother hadn't been so keen on my staying but the truth was I saw it as a way of escaping my parents ..."

Thus, while his Lebanese former classmates begin their university studies, Ivan works as an interpreter for a number of foreign medical volunteers - physicians and physical therapists from India, Norway and Scotland - in Sabra's hospital.

Occasionally he helps out an American television journalist. And protected (or so he hopes ) by his Danish passport, he also serves as a courier for the remnant of the PLO cadre operating underground. Free of parental supervision, he spends his nights in the company of the volunteers and a few of their male Palestinian friends, drinking, getting stoned and being initiated into sex. All in all, the perfect setup for a bildungsroman against an intriguing historical backdrop.

From Ivan's perspective, the war has reached its denouement. Israeli troops still have the city surrounded. But with the PLO evicted, the bombing and shelling have stopped, and Ivan's life - except for an occasional spike in adrenalin related to his clandestine duties - has settled into a quotidian round of work and play. Even the war injuries he confronts in the Sabra hospital don't seem to rattle him. Unlike our narrator, however, we know that the worst - a paroxysm of carnage committed by the Christian Phalange militia in Sabra and Chatila - is yet to come. Indeed, Hiller's publisher describes the novel as the flip (that is, Palestinian ) side of Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir." And though "Sabra Zoo" lacks that film's psychological depth and hallmark surrealism, the comparison is not unwarranted.

The description of what Ivan sees in Sabra after the massacre is graphic and appropriately harrowing. But it is Hiller's restraint in describing the Israeli soldiers' protestations that they were clueless about the massacre going on in the camps - which they had surrounded to block entry or escape - that best testifies to his mettle as a novelist. Here would be just the place to give free rein to Palestinian fury. I, for one, was expecting a rant to emerge from one character or another. Instead, the narration remains modulated and focused on the march of events as the medical volunteers begin to go their separate ways, and Ivan must choose between staying put for the sake of the cause or fleeing to a haven of safety and stability.

Don't bet you can guess what he chooses.

Classic thriller ingredients:

The tale told by narrator Michel Khoury in Hiller's "Shake Off" (2011 ) picks up chronologically where Ivan's leaves off. Orphaned by the massacre in Sabra, in which he too nearly lost his life, the teenaged Michel is placed with an elderly, childless Palestinian couple - Christians, like himself - in West Beirut. There he is visited by a man he comes to know only as Abu Leila, a shadowy but kindly figure who cultivates the traumatized boy and expands his horizons by introducing him to the works of leading Arab writers and even to books about the Holocaust, so as to better "know the enemy." Equally seductive is Abu Leila's intimation that he will help Michel pursue a path to avenge his parents' murder.

All this we learn in flashbacks, for when we meet Michel it is 1989 and he is a PLO undercover agent in London posing as a student. Trained in the rigors of spy craft (with which the book is replete ), among the advantages he brings to his job is a chameleon-like quality that enables him to "be taken for either Swiss or Lebanese" (the nationalities of two of the false passports he possesses ). Indeed, we're told, he has also been mistaken for "French, Italian, Greek and even Israeli." Abu Leila, whom Michel has come to regard as his "mentor and surrogate father," is now his handler. With the exception of a London-based Palestinian who occasionally serves as a courier to and from the West Bank, Abu Leila is also Michel's sole contact in the PLO's compartmentalized network.

To assuage his haunting memories, Michel has become addicted to codeine. And to ease his profound loneliness, he allows himself to become emotionally involved with Helen, a graduate student in his rooming house, though he's gnawed by the suspicion that she's cheating on him. Deception, if that is indeed Helen's game, is mutual, of course, as Michel is hardly whom he appears to be. Soon after their affair begins, he wonders whether it would be possible to have more than a sexual relationship with Helen. "The reality was that the attraction of having a relationship was in part telling her about my life, sharing its burdens," he confides. But Michel understands that the obstacles to revealing himself to a woman "were big, not least of all Abu Leila, to whom it would be a betrayal."

In contrast to Hiller's first novel, "Shake Off" is styled as a classic thriller boasting all the ingredients of that genre. The noir-like flat, clipped sentences of Michel's narrative keep the pace going even when the tension generated by the plot occasionally wanes. And in the best le Carre tradition, Michel's being in touch with feelings he's not free to act upon engages our sentiments all the more. As to his immediate plight, suffice it to say that as the saga unfolds Michel finds himself on the run, after coming into possession of a packet smuggled out of the West Bank for which one man has already been murdered. Whether out of naivete, fear or sheer discipline, he delays opening the envelope for which he is risking his life. When its contents are finally revealed to him, at the climax of a chase across Britain, Michel discovers that he's been living a lie in more ways than he knew.

As the first Lebanon war, or "Operation Peace for Galilee," as it was then called, took place before the days of satellite news stations and the Internet, Israelis on the home front could only imagine its impact on the residents of besieged Beirut. As I recall, the standard shot of the hostilities shown on Israel's sole and government-controlled TV station was of black smoke billowing up from somewhere behind a distant mountain ridge. These novels not only bring home what it felt like on the receiving end of Israel's "long arm" and misbegotten alliance with the Phalange but, by focusing on diaspora refugees, inevitably remind us that the geopolitical scope of the "Palestinian problem" extends beyond the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Hiller, who is 49, brings to his works not only a craftsman's skill but also a compassion for his characters that proves infectious. He is no propagandist, however. True, the sinister presence of Israelis hovers over both these novels, as wanton invaders in the first and relentless hunters in the second. But with one exception, as actual characters who interact with the protagonists, Israelis have only cameo roles, so that the sting we feel at perceiving our compatriots as the "bad guys" is brief. Be forewarned, though: The depth of the cruelty practiced by that one exception is stunning.
The Daily Telegraph
29th March 2011

Michel is a Lebanese orphan of the 1982 refugee camp killings that inspired Mischa Hiller’s prize-winning debut, Sabra Zoo. Seven years on, he’s a haunted, pill-popping PLO agent juggling a forbidden lover, a murdered mentor, a mysterious package and an urgent need to flee both his own side and Mossad. Melancholy and dreamlike, Hiller’s neat upending of conventions movingly captures the realpolitik of a conflict perpetuated by the shared interests of enemies.
The Economist
26th Feb. 2011
Hard to Shake Off - A shrewd espionage thriller
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A BEDSIT in Tufnell Park, an unremarkable suburb of north London, seems an unlikely setting for an espionage thriller about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Until the hero, Michel, who is a survivor of the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, takes out a bundle of fake passports and foreign currency from a secret alcove in the bathroom and goes to work.

Mischa Hiller’s debut, “Sabra Zoo”, a chilling rites-of-passage novel set in Beirut in 1982 during the killings in the camps, was highly praised. “Shake Off” builds on that success. The book sweeps the reader straight into the deadly world of an operative, where everyday objects and events are weapons and battlefields in the undercover war. As every good thriller should try to do, “Shake Off” is peppered with expert tradecraft: how to hide money in a rolled-up newspaper, how wet paper is easier to flush away than dry.

But “Shake Off” is more than a straightforward spy thriller. Mr Hiller’s book is both poignant and human. As Michel tries to cope with loss and grief, memories erupt like a volcano, such as his father pushing him over as the gunmen open fire—and then slowly expiring on top of him. Not surprisingly, Michel has become a junkie who cannot sleep unless he first swallows a handful of codeine tablets. Charged by his handler, Abu Leila, with finding a secret venue for talks between Israelis and Palestinians, Michel also reads Primo Levi, where he finds dark echoes of what happened to him in Lebanon.

“Shake Off” is written in the first person, and Mr Hiller, who grew up in Beirut, London and Dar es Salaam, has a unique and engaging voice. The book’s narrow focus intensifies both the narrative drama and Michel’s inner desolation. Mr Hiller’s writing style is sparse but evocative; the hero’s bare room and the loneliness of exile deftly drawn. Words are used sparingly and effectively; the Phalangists don’t burst in that fateful night, they “interrupt” Michel’s family’s final dinner.

The menace builds steadily until a brutal assassination in Berlin, after which Michel, tracked by Mossad, goes on the run to the highlands of Scotland. Only Helen, his feisty neighbour, with whom he has formed a close bond, can offer some kind of salvation. Forced to use her as a kind of sanctuary, he endangers the woman he loves. Powerful and thought-provoking, this is a book that stays with the reader. Mr Hiller’s “Shake Off” is hard to shake off.

http://www.economist.com/node/18226565?story_id=18226565

Fiction Uncovered
Reviewed by Ashley Stokes
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Mischa Hiller’s 2010 novel Sabra Zoo ended with its protagonist Ivan morally disabused on an outward-bound flight from Beirut after he witnesses at firsthand the Sabra and Shatila massacres, the mass murder of Palestinian civilians by Israeli-sponsored neo-fascists in 1982. This still-little known atrocity casts a long shadow over his second novel, Shake Off (Telegram Books).

It is now 1989 and Michel Khoury, the sole-surviving member of a family killed at Sabra is a PLO secret agent living undercover in London bedsit-land. Trained by the Soviets in the arts of espionage and shuttling between West Berlin, Switzerland and Athens at the bidding of his mentor Abu Leila, Michel has a plethora of aliases, a deep-seated commitment to the cause and an addiction to Codeine that suggests a more profound identity crisis than mere exile. While Michel is supposed to be organizing a secret conference to discuss a radical solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the surety of his clandestine life is unsettled by an affair with Helen, his sexy, directionless neighbour, herself trying to detach herself from her PhD supervisor, a sleazy Greek drunk Michel calls ‘Zorba’. When a mysterious package smuggled out of the West Bank comes into Michel’s hands, he begins to realize he’s being followed by ‘The Competition’: Mossad agents. After an assassination in Berlin, ‘The Competition’ work out where Michel lives, sending him and Helen on a cat-and-mouse trip across England and Scotland and towards a brilliantly delivered twist-ending and a return to the world of Lebanese refugee camps.

Shake Off is an expertly constructed, serpentine and suspenseful novel that alternates between driven hide-and-seek sequences and numb meditations. It’s beautifully atmospheric too, and a low-rent London of dank bedsits and grey institutional buildings becomes a palpable presence (the only false note of period detail being that the Waterstones in Gower Street where Michel buys a Primo Levi book was still a Dillons as late as 1995). Michel himself is the PLO equivalent to the existential misfit foot soldier found in Le Carre’s Smiley novels, Graham Greene’s The Human Factor or the Harry Palmer series, ‘part of a grander plan that [calls] for sacrifice and putting [his] own interests last’, an expendable pawn in a chess game that he begins to realize is no more than a too-frequently canted metaphor. The title comes from the literal Arabic for Intifada. There is much more here than the perceived Zionist oppressor for Michel to shake-off.

Shake Off is more emphatically a genre novel than Sabra Zoo but one that continues in the vein of that novel’s complexity, compassion and ability to disturb the recent past without resort to sentimentality or soapboxing.
The Independent
23rd Feb. 2011
PLO drama smuggles in the thrills
Reviewed by Lucy Popescu
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Mischa Hiller's assured debut, Sabra Zoo, concerned the 1982 massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese Muslim civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. These horrific acts provide the backdrop to his follow-up novel, Shake Off, and are the catalyst for his young protagonist Michel's induction as an undercover PLO operative.

The novel opens in 1989, a few months before the Berlin Wall comes down. Michel, trained by the KGB, is posing as a student and living in London. Although loyal to the cause, he suffers from post-traumatic stress after witnessing the brutal murder of his family and has an addiction to codeine.

Michel's primary contact and mentor, the enigmatic Abu-Leila, has charged him with finding a UK venue for secret Palestinian-Israeli talks. But when Abu-Leila is assassinated in Berlin, Michel is forced on the run, unwittingly in possession of a package that has been smuggled out of the Occupied Territories. Pursued by both the Israelis and Palestinians, Michel is forced to seek the help of Helen, a fellow student and neighbour, with whom he has become romantically involved.

Some readers may be initially put off by the detailed descriptions of the world of espionage – the coding and decoding of messages, the surreal conversations in public phone booths, the dead-letter drops, the modified luggage for smuggling packages and the art of picking locks. There are also some unconvincing plot-lines, such as Michel's reluctance to know the contents of the package. But in the second half of Shake Off, when Michel is trailed through the streets of London and Cambridge to a remote corner of Scotland, Hiller ratchets up the pace in the best thriller tradition.

Hiller certainly knows his stuff and the various intrigues of his agents and double-agents are entirely credible. The use of Canadian passports by Israeli agents recalls the Mossad's misuse of British passports in Dubai last year. Hiller is also admirably measured in his account of the passions, betrayalss and hypocrisies on both sides.

Shake Off is something of a slow burn, but Hiller tackles complex issues with sensitivity and his portrait of a traumatised survivor is also deeply affecting. As such, Shake Off is a satisfying read and a clever thriller. Hiller's second novel is more than enough proof that this British-Palestinian writer is an upcoming talent to watch.
The Fiction Desk
24th Feb. 2011
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Regular readers of this blog might remember my review of Sabra Zoo, Mischa Hiller‘s excellent debut novel based around the 1982 massacre in Sabra Camp. I concluded that review by saying how much I was looking forward to Hiller’s next book.

Well, his next book is here now, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Shake Off is set in 1989 and is narrated by Michel, a young PLO agent living undercover in London as a student. Sabra rears its head here, too: Michel is both a victim and a creation of that event, which claimed the lives of his family and led to his adoption by a PLO operative who arranged his education and later his training in espionage. Now he lives alone in a bedsit, addicted to painkillers and shunning human contact. His life, from what he does to how he lives, has essentially become a complex coping mechanism for his past. The enforced solitude and paranoia of his work create a noise that blocks out the past from his days in the same way the codeine gets him through the nights:

"So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its counter-surveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off."

But while Michel is good at what he does—and we get plenty of insights into the tricks of his trade—he is still an unwitting pawn, and the comparison that kept coming to mind was Alfred Hitchcock. Michel is very much a Hitchcock innocent, drawn into a murky underworld that he shouldn’t have anything to do with—even if that drawing-in has taken place years before the story is set. The story too has a Hitchcockian feel to it: the tense but witty set-pieces involving counter-espionage in Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road, or the move from the London of the opening chapters to a climax set in the wilds of Scotland. The novel as a whole feels like one of Hitchcock’s better films, and I doubt that the cinematic appeal of the book is entirely coincidental. Hiller certainly knows his cinema—his screenplay for Sabra Zoo won the European Independent Film Festival script competition.

That said, it doesn’t do this book justice to simply praise it as a cinematic book, or an embryonic movie. The writing is strong and confident, even when the narrator is not: Michel and his world are vividly evoked. Hiller is, I think, an excellent writer. Sabra Zoo went down well, and Shake Off is getting positive reviews absolutely everywhere. Well-written enough to please the serious reader, and fast-paced and engaging enough for the beach (if summer ever comes), Shake Off deserves to do very well.

http://www.thefictiondesk.com/blog/shake-off-by-mischa-hiller/