Palestine Affair

«Like the best of historical fiction, Wilson’s story is placed in an imagined past, but it is really happening right now. . . . You’re likely to stay up late reading.» —The Washington Post Book World

«A fine novel. . . . Thrilling . . . startling. . . . Exquisitely spare prose.» —The Seattle Times

«An engrossing, complex, and fearless tale of politics, arts, murder, sex, and history (personal and global) set in the rough and tumble that was Palestine in 1924.» —Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent

«This rich novel . . . resonates with Hemingway’s harrowing work after World War I.» —The Christian Science Monitor

«A Palestine Affair is hard to put down. . . . [It] echoes its modernist predecessors: Forster’s A Passage to India, Conrad’s The Secret Agent, and James’s The Princess Casamassima.» —San Francisco Chronicle

«A story that tautens the sinuous strands of [the] period into a lethal knot.» —The New York Times Book Review

In British-occupied Palestine after World War I, Mark Bloomberg, a beleaguered London painter, and Joyce, his American wife, witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew. Joyce, a non-Jew and ardent Zionist, is drawn into an affair with the British investigating officer, while Mark seeks solace in the exotic colors and contours of the Middle Eastern landscape. Each of the three has come to Palestine to escape grief, and yet—caught in the crosshairs of history—they will all be forced to confront the very issues they hoped to leave behind in this swift and sensuous novel of artful concealment and roiling passions.