The Weight of Ghosts: A Novel

A Shin Bet agent hunting her father's killer's son. A Hamas operative captured by his father's victim's daughter. An interrogation that will determine if cycles of revenge can ever be broken.

Noa Katz was seventeen when a car bomb exploded on a street in Kfar Saba, killing her father. The bomb was built by Ahmed Massoud, a Palestinian resistance fighter who spent thirty years choosing the cause over his family.

Now, after the devastation of October 7th, 2023, Noa is a hardened intelligence officer hunting Ahmed's son.

Khalil Massoud crossed the fence that morning. He witnessed horrors he couldn't stop. He participated in violence he can never undo. And now he's being hunted through the wreckage of Gaza by the daughter of the man his father killed—a symmetry so perfect it feels biblical.

When Noa finally captures Khalil after a seven-week pursuit across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, what should be a moment of justice becomes something else entirely: a devastating interrogation that forces both of them to confront impossible questions.

Who has the right to this land? Whose pain matters more? Can people shaped by generational violence ever choose differently than their fathers? And when you recognize your enemy as human—when you understand you would have done the same things if born on the other side—what happens then?

From the tunnels beneath Gaza to Hezbollah's collapse in Lebanon, from the diplomatic halls of Doha to the secret facilities of Tehran, The Weight of Ghosts is an unflinching exploration of manufactured enemies, inherited trauma, and the terrible cost of trying to be "less worse" than the generation before.

"Devastating, brilliant, and unbearably human. This is what literature about impossible conflicts should be."

This is not a book about heroes and villains. It's about two people trapped in a cycle neither created, both trying to save their families, both discovering they're the same. It's about what happens when revenge meets recognition, when the hunter sees herself in the hunted, and when being "less worse" is the only moral framework left.

The Weight of Ghosts offers no easy answers and takes no political sides. Instead, it honors the complexity and pain of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while exploring how cycles of violence perpetuate across generations—and what it might cost to break them.

Perfect for readers of:

Daniel Silva's Gabriel Allon series

David Grossman's To the End of the Land

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

Complex moral thrillers that don't shy from difficult questions

Content advisory: This novel contains graphic depictions of violence, terrorism, war crimes including sexual assault, and explores the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with unflinching honesty about atrocities committed by all sides.

Book One of The Ghosts Trilogy

The story continues in Book Two: TEHRAN

© 2025 PublishDrive (Ebook): 6610001082277

Release date

Ebook: 10 October 2025