"The poignant, whimsically imaginative stories in Omer Friedlander's debut transport readers to the narrow limestone alleyways of Jerusalem, the desolate beauty of the Negev Desert, and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa. Across the sharply drawn borders that divide them, Friedlander's characters, often outsiders or even outcasts, are haunted by the past, or by the promise of a future that they can see but often cannot reach. A divorced con artist...

When Rania--the only female Palestinian police detective in the northern West Bank, as well as a young mother in a rural community where many believe women should not have such a dangerous career--discovers the body of a foreign woman on the edge of her village, no one seems to want her look too deeply into what's happened. But she finds an ally in Chloe--a gay, Jewish-American peace worker with a camera and a big attitude--and together, with the...