Introduction From The Guardian Ayelet Gundar-Goshen: ‘We Israelis tend to forget that we are a nation of refugees’ The novelist and psychologist on the incident that inspired her new book, the impact of cultural boycotts and why she can’t leave her homeland. Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is an Israeli novelist, screenwriter and psychologist. Her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, won the Sapir prize for debut fiction – Israel’s Man Booker – and her second, Waking Lions, is already a German bestseller. She has also worked for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. The catalyst for the drama in Waking Lions is a rich, Jewish doctor running over an Eritrean refugee and deciding to flee the scene. Where did that idea come from? When I was backpacking in India, I met an Israeli guy who’d run over a local Indian and didn’t stop. When he told me this I thought there’s no way he wouldn’t have stopped if he’d hit me – an Israeli woman, the same age as him. But when somebody looks different and you’re certain nobody has seen – I wanted the reader to ask if they’re sure they wouldn’t do the same. There’s a biblical sensibility to Waking Lions; it reads like a modern morality tale about guilt, penance and displaced people. Absolutely. The refugees who are walking from Eritrea to Israel these days are walking the exact same road that the people of Israel walked when they left Sinai for the Promised Land. But now we, the Jewish people, are the gatekeepers. This is something that haunted me as I sat down to write the novel. There’s a sense in the novel that the Eritrean refugees are almost invisible to the privileged Israelis. Exactly. These refugees are completely unseen. The people who take your bags in the supermarket, the people who clean your table in the restaurant: they’re next to us but we don’t bother to look at them. And this is really the story of Jewish history: of being unseen. One of the novel’s themes is that there are no cultural differences in human suffering. Do you think that empathy is missing from contemporary debates around immigration? I think it’s hard to have empathy with people who don’t look like you. And I think we [Israelis] tend to forget that we are a nation of refugees. I think we see them as an economical threat, but we don’t really see them as people escaping for their lives. What changes would you like to see in Israeli government policy towards refugees? Right now, Israel gives the definition of a refugee to less than 1% of people knocking at our door from Eritrea. And what they usually say is that we can’t have all of Africa coming here. But there are a lot of numbers between 1% and 100%. It has to be more than 1%. You’ve said previously that for people to have kept praying for the establishment of Israel, they needed “a big hope or a big insanity”. Which do you think it was? You can’t long for something for 2,000 years and then suddenly have it and not go a little bit crazy. I still have hope but I think it’s insane to raise my kids here. But you wouldn’t want to raise your kids anywhere else? I wouldn’t be able to leave Israel, even as much as I hate the current government. I’m too rooted in the culture and in the language. And I also feel it would be irresponsible. People in Israel call leftwing people like me traitors and I don’t think we’re traitors at all. I think that to really love your country is to stand there and to fight when you think what it’s doing is wrong. As a psychologist, if Israel were your patient, what would be your professional diagnosis? Severe post-traumatic stress disorder. When you have a patient with PTSD, it’s the trauma that still colours everything. So how would you help Israel recover? Continuously and patiently remind Israel where it is now. That the present and the past are not the same thing. But then again, I think Israel is a much more stubborn patient than any patient I ever met. There’s been a lot of debate in Britain around cultural boycotts of Israel. Do you think boycotts are effective? I think cultural boycotts are a catastrophe; first, they give privilege to ignorance. It’s ignoring the complexity of Israeli society. And I think complexity and diversity are exactly what readers and writers should seek daily. Second, they just help the siege mentality. If we’re talking about Israel having PTSD, cultural boycotts strengthen that – you’re not paranoid if people really are chasing you.
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| Dead Letters: A Novel by Caite Dolan-LeachPsychological Suspense. Irresponsible Zelda Antipova has apparently died in a barn fire, but her twin sister Ava doesn't really believe it -- especially not after she starts receiving cryptic messages from Zelda and discovering the clues her sister seems to have purposefully left behind. Their relationship a complicated one, Ava (who has her own issues) embarks on a scavenger-hunt-like quest to figure out what actually happened, hampered by her alcoholic, dementia-addled mother, her estranged father, and her hyper-critical grandmother. If you like twisted, manipulative games full of red herrings, you'll devour Dead Letters. |
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| Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-GoshenPsychological Suspense. After exposing corruption in his Tel Aviv hospital, neurosurgeon Eitan Green was rewarded with a crummy posting in dusty Beersheba, in the Negev desert. Driving home after a long shift, he hits a man on a deserted road and flees the scene, leaving incriminating evidence behind. The very next day, his victim's widow shows up with a proposition: if he offers free medical treatment to Eritrean refugees, she won't turn him in. He agrees, but must lie to his wife about his whereabouts -- and she just happens to be the detective assigned to the fatal hit-and-run. With a complex social dynamic underlying this tense read, it's a good bet for readers interested in a fictional take on refugee politics, racial intolerance, and moral dilemmas. |
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| Spook Street by Mick HerronSpy Fiction. This one's a tough one to talk about without giving too much away. But if you're unfamiliar with the Slough House series (this is the 4th entry), you should know that it's about English spies who have been forcibly desk-bound. Not content to just fade away, they manage to get involved in plenty of escapades (start with Slow Horses if you want to get in at the beginning). Here, failed spook River Cartwright is worrying about his grandfather's increasing senility and paranoia (it's causing him to spill secrets from his own -- spectacular -- career as a spy). Dark humor and engaging characters abound in both this book and the series as a whole. |
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| The Loving Husband by Christobel KentPsychological Suspense. Nathan and Fran Hall have left crowded, dirty London to create a new life for their children on a farm in Nathan's hometown. But when Fran finds Nathan dead -- and is unable to answer any questions the local police have for her -- she struggles with both the isolation and the slowly earned knowledge that her marriage to Nathan wasn't what she thought it was. With a powerfully rendered, bleak environment that highlights the gaps in Fran's understanding of what actually happened, The Loving Husband is a "truly, chilling read" (Kirkus Reviews). |
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| Shining City by Tom RosenstielPolitical Thriller. Political fixers Peter Rena and Randi Brooks have been hired by the U.S. president to vet his nominee for the Supreme Court, Roland Madison. It turns out that in the 1960s Madison was involved in some radical activities, spurring his critics to denounce him, but this problem is soon overshadowed when someone starts killing people connected to Madison. Rena and Brooks must now not only find out who's behind the murders (and why), but also protect the president from any political backlash. A veteran political journalist, debut author Tom Rosenstiel has filled this novel with plenty of Washington insight. |
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| Sharp Objects: A Novel by Gillian FlynnPsychological Suspense. Dysfunctional family relationships, long-buried secrets, and manipulative women lie at the heart of this compelling novel. After eight years away, reporter Camille Preaker has returned to her hometown to investigate the recent murders of two young girls. Haunted by memories of her long-dead sister, she must also deal with a Lolita-like half-sister and their mother, who may have caused Camille's childhood illnesses. As Camille investigates, she uncovers horrible family secrets and relives the childhood that led her to self-mutilation. Though you likely know author Gillian Flynn from the bestselling Gone Girl, this debut won both the Steel Dagger and the New Blood Dagger awards in 2007. The HBO television series based on this book (with Amy Adams in the lead role) is filming now and will premiere in 2018. |
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| The Dinner: A Novel by Herman KochPsychological Suspense. Over the course of an evening at a fashionable Amsterdam restaurant, two couples move from small talk during the appetizer to weightier issues as the meal continues. Brought together by their sons -- who have done something awful -- we learn more about what ties the families together, and what seems to be a skewering of upper-class values turns into something far darker. It will be interesting to see how the literary prose, taut suspense, dark humor, and unlikeable, unreliable narrators translate to screen next month. (Interestingly, author Herman Koch refused to attend the post-premiere reception.) |
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| Live by Night by Dennis LehaneHistorical Crime Fiction. During the heady days of Prohibition, Boston cop's son Joe Coughlin defies his strict upbringing and chooses instead to "live by night": from trading in narcotics and bootleg booze in Boston to life as a respected Mafioso in Florida and Cuba, he loves and lives dangerously. Live by Night, which is the 2nd in a loosely planned trilogy that began with The Given Day and is followed by World Gone By, was released as a feature film this past November. With only a 35% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes, you might be better off with the utterly compelling novel instead, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 2013. |
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| Red Sparrow: A Novel by Jason MatthewsSpy Fiction. Former ballerina Dominika Egorova serves Vladimir Putin's regime by seducing, then spying on, enemies of the state. CIA officer Nate Nash has been reassigned to Helsinki after nearly blowing the cover of a highly valuable Russian mole, and this is where Dominika latches on, determined to learn the mole's identity. But Dominika is more than a pretty lady -- she's smart, and her synesthesia allows her to tell when someone is lying. As they try to outwit and out-spy each other, readers are treated to vivid, authentic details of spycraft; author Jason Matthews worked for the CIA for more than 30 years, and there are shades of John le Carré in his writing. This one you'll have to wait a while before seeing -- Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Lawrence are set to star, but it won't be in theaters until November. |
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