Martyrs' Crossing

From the author of the prize-winning The Rainy Seasona sophisticated and suspenseful (The New York Times Book Review) novel of love, fear, divided loyalties, ruined friendships, and personal sacrificeagainst a backdrop of war in the Holy Land.

One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him.

He is drawn to Marina, the boys mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as her soldier. In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes.

Marinas father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandsons story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship. Caught in historys terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces.

Martyrs Crossing is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution (Entertainment Weekly). So precise, so startling, so unforgettable (Los Angeles Times), it offers an unparalleled story of the ambiguities of warof inarticulate longing and broken vowsset in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank.