Book description
'The further away anyone was from that block of Ben Yehuda street, the
easier it seemed to find a solution to the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians, that stubborn mess in the centre of the Middle East and
the more I studied these solutions, the more I thought that they
depended for their implementation on a population of table football men,
painted in the colours of the two teams: blue and white for the
Israelis, green, red and black for the Palestinians. All the
international community had to do was to twist the levers and the little
players would kick and swing and send the ball into the net, to victory'
One block of a Tel Aviv street is the starting point for Linda Grant's
exploration of the inner dynamics of Israelis - not the government and
its policies, but the people themselves, in all their variety. Iraqi
shop-keepers, Teenage soldiers, Mob bosses, Tunisian-born settlers,
Russian scientists, and the father of the child victim of a suicide
bomber are some of the people she meets. Linda Grant was born in
Liverpool. Her novel When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize.
Her most recent novel is the highly-acclaimed Still Here.
