Hercule Poirot's vacation in the Holy Land is interrupted by death in Petra, where the lifeless body of Mrs. Boynton, a detestable English woman who cowed her family and strangers alike, is found atop the rose red cliffs. Though her family claims her heart failure was a natural event, the tiny puncture mark on her wrist is a clear sign of the fatal injection that really killed her.

"Winner of a Jewish National Book Award for his previous book, Walking Israel, NBC Special Correspondent Martin Fletcher uses meticulous research and his own family's history in this stunning novel. Dramatizing explosive events in London and Palestine in the years directly following World War II, The List follows the lives of Edith and Georg, Austrian refugees who are expecting their first baby in a world unfriendly to Jews. Anti-Semitism sweeps across...

Two men wait through the night in British-controlled Palestine for dawn - and for death. One is a captured English officer. The other is Elisha, a young Israeli freedom fighter whose assignment is to kill the officer in reprisal for Britain's execution of a Jewish prisoner. Elisha's past is the nightmare memory of Nazi death camps. He is the only surviving member of his family. His future is a cherished dream of life in the promised homeland. But...

"After years away from her family's homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn't been since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London...

"Hawwa is a child of the grinding hardship of a Palestinian refugee camp. She has had to survive the camp itself, as well as the humiliation and destruction of an abusive family life. But now, later in life, something most unexpected has happened: she has fallen in love. Velvet unfolds over a day in Hawwa's life, as she makes plans for a new beginning that may take her out of the camp. She sifts back through her memories of the past: the stories of...

Lars Petter Sveen's Children of God recounts the lives of people on the margins of the New Testament; thieves, Roman soldiers, prostitutes, lepers, healers, and the occasional disciple all get a chance to speak. With language free of judgment or moralizing, Sveen covers familiar ground in unusual ways. In the opening story, a group of soldiers are tasked with carrying out King Herod's edict to slaughter the young male children in Bethlehem but waver...

"Ruqayya was only thirteen when the Nakba came to her village in Palestine in 1948. The massacre in Tantoura drove her from her home and from everything she had ever known. She had not left her village before, but she would never return. Now an old woman, Ruqayya looks back on a long life in exile, one that has taken her to Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf, and given her children and grandchildren. Through her depth of experience and her indomitable spirit,...

"In 1986 Israeli writers and readers alike were startled by the appearance of a novel about an Arab village in the Galilee and the protean identity of its narrator. That this first novel was written in resourceful and often eloquent Hebrew and in a highly sophisticated narrative mode was remarkable enough. But even more provocative and significant was the identity of the author. For Anton Shammas was not another aspiring Jewish author haunted by the...

"In 1933, Ivor Castle, an Oxford-educated Jew, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel for the two men accused of murdering Haim Arlosoroff, a figure whose tactics to get Jews out of Hitler's Germany and into Palestine were controversial enough to get him killed. Ivor, an innocent to the politics of the case, falls into bed and deeply in love with Tsiona, a free-spirited painter who sketched the accused men in...

"Set in Jaffa in 1947-51, this fable-like novel is a heartbreaking tale of young love during the beginning of the destruction of Palestine and displacement of its people. At times darkly humorous and ironic but also profoundly moving, this novel based on a true story follows the lives of a 15 year old engineer, Subhi, and the 13 year old girl, Shams, he hopes one day to marry. It brings Jaffa vividly to life as a beautiful city by the sea where Jews,...