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Palestine Affairby Wilson, Jonathan
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Book DescriptionLike New. Book summarySet in Palestine in the early 1920s, Jonathan Wilson's second novel is about three characters whose fates interlock in a devastating counterpoint to the tense political situation there. Robert Kirsch is a British Jew working for the Palestinians as a police detective. Mark Bloomberg is a failed (and depressed) London painter hired to paint the Zionist settlements in Palestine, who is alienated from his non-Jewish wife Joyce, an American interested in the Zionist cause. When a local journalist is murdered, the stories of all concerned converge, and each is forced to seek a kind of redemption in an unexpected place. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.Media Reviews"Wilson has devised a story that tautens the sinuous strands of this period into a lethal knot. The strengths of his novel are the tension and pace of its plot....[The] resolutions suffer from glibness. Sentences claim more than they accomplish....The author tries his lusty best in the sex scenes, but it is like watching someone address a Big Mac with a silver knife and fork....Most important..., the prenatal injuries that will come to mark the state of Israel's birth and later life are convincingly dramatized." -- Richard Eder, New York Times Book Review "Like the best of historical fiction, Wilson's story is placed in an imagined past, but it is really happening right now." -- Gershom Gorenberg, Washington Post Book World Publisher NotesThis swift and sensual novel of passion and politics transports us to British Palestine, where the Arabs, the British, and the Jews mingle in a scene of colonial excess and unease. It is 1924, and Mark Bloomberg, a disillusioned London painter, arrives in Jerusalem to take up a propaganda commission. When he and his American wife, Joyce, accidentally witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew near their cottage, they become embroiled in an investigation that will test their marriage and their characters. Joyce, an ardent Zionist, is pulled into an affair with Robert Kirsch, the British policeman investigating the case, while Bloomberg, transfixed by the desert light, attempts to capture on canvas the complex, shifting truths of the region. Like Kirsch, whose brother was killed in France in 1918, all of the characters here have come to Palestine to escape the grief of the First World War, and are forced to confront their principles and their hearts in the midst of a culture in the throes of painful emergence. Lushly detailed and compellingly cinematic, A Palestine Affair illuminates a lesser-known aspect of the history of the Middle East as it tells a powerful story in which love proves to be, ultimately, a force as strong as politics. Other Recommended Books
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