Colum McCann’s odd and ambitious book contains almost 500 pages of fact and fiction about the Israel‑Palestine conflict, combined with various quotations, asides, remarks, insights, musings and statements of fact on all manner of subjects, including the working habits of Picasso, the invention and manufacture of rubber bullets, the work of senator George Mitchell during the Northern Ireland peace talks and the correspondence between Einstein and Freud. Accompanied by a few photographs and images, the text is arranged in 1001 numbered sections, numbered 1-500, plus a bridging section, numbered 1001, and then sections numbered 500-1. This vast and curious arrangement of parts is clearly intended to recall the One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade’s famous telling of Middle Eastern folktales in order to ward off death.

Apeirogon is named, we learn, “for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides”, which is certainly a good title for a book that eludes easy categorisation (and for one that explores the furiously intractable Israel-Palestine conflict). It is a hybrid work, neither exactly fact nor fiction. The closest recent comparisons – in terms of ambition and intention, if not style – might be Claudia Rankine’s genre-defying works on race, such as Citizen: An American Lyric, or Maggie Nelson’s exploration in The Red Parts and Jane: A Murder of the murder of her aunt, books that transcend the usual categories and set out to challenge and amaze.

“An Israeli, against the occupation. A Palestinian, studying the Holocaust.” At the centre of Apeirogon are the transcripts of interviews conducted by McCann with two men – Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli – whose lives were brought together by grief. In 1997 Elhanan’s 13‑year-old daughter Smadar was killed by a suicide bomber. In 2007 Aramin’s 10-year-old daughter Abir was shot by an Israeli soldier. The two men met through the charity the Parents Circle Family Forum and have since made it their life’s work to travel the world together, speaking about their experiences of loss, pain and healing. “I don’t have time for hate any more,” McCann quotes Aramin. “We need to learn how to use our pain.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colum McCann. Photograph: Tim Knox/The Guardian

Around these two profound and plain-speaking nonfiction centrepieces, McCann recounts and imagines aspects of the men’s stories, the girls’ experiences, and multiple other tales. These are little micro-narratives, sometimes only a sentence long, sometimes stretching across several pages and referring back and forth throughout the book. They muse on life in Israel and under the occupation, and on Borges, Theresienstadt, Philippe Petit, Christ’s crucifixion, bird migrations. (Birds function as a symbol throughout the book: symbols of freedom, providers of alternative perspectives.) Sometimes the entries seem trivial. Section No 360, for example, reads, in its entirety: “End the Preoccupation.” And the endless lists, as lists can do, pall. Wi tness No 385: “The Separation Wall. Also known as the Separation Barrier. Also known as the Separation Fence. Also known as … ” etc. But at other times the relentlessness seems entirely necessary, and the brevity is to the point. No 126: “Albert Einstein wrote to the American Friends of the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel – known also as the Stern Gang – to say that, after the massacre in Deir Yassin, he would no longer be willing to assist them with aid or help raise money for their cause.”

The book offers few if any of the usual satisfactions of the novel. But as a compendium of facts, a homage, a kind of creative response to the brave, sad work of Aramin and Elhanan, it is both insightful and moving. The amassing of all the incidental detail is what really adds up: we learn that when she was killed, Smadar was wearing a Blondie T-shirt and listening to Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U” on her Walkman, while Abir had just bought a candy bracelet. “I began to think,” says Aramin, “that I had stumbled upon the most important question of them all: what can you do, personally, in order to try to help prevent this unbearable pain for others?” You can honour the story - the stories, rather. Which is exactly what McCann has done.

• Apeirogon by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (RRP £18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.