This wonderfully immersive and compelling novel begins in Jerusalem in 1947 in the last days of the British Mandate of Palestine. Lila, a Jewish woman, and Elias, a Christian Arab meet and fall in love, but the conflict that is soon to emerge in the new state of Israel means that their relationship is doomed from the start. A story of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, the book gives a vivid and atmospheric portrait of Jerusalem almost up to the present day and shows how war and politics impacted, and still impacts on the whole population, putting a human face onto political conflict. At times the writing is far too embarrassingly saccharine for its own good when it comes to describing the love affair between Lila and Elias, particularly when describing their more intimate moments, but overall I found the novel an engaging read which illuminated the fraught relationship between Jews and Arabs over these last tumultuous decades.

Thank you to NetGalley and AmazonCrossing for this free readers edition. In exchange I am providing an honest review.



I wanted to like this title. Heck, I wanted to like it enough to finish it. But alas, so many books so little time to spend on ones that don't engage me.

This tale of Elias and Lila, a Christian Arab and a Jew who meet and fall in love in 1947, sounds like it would be a really interesting story but I didn't find it to be so. It felt slow and it was not interesting mostly because it seemed to be taking so long to get to some sort of climax in the story. I kept reading, hoping it would pick up and the pace would change but it didn't in the time I gave it and I kept making excuses to put it down so I decided to call it and move on. It's a shame really, I was looking forward to the exploration of the relationship between an Arab and a Jew in a heated part of the world.