Book description
Lea, Avishag and Yael are school friends in a small town in northern
Israel. During dull lessons they play the game Exquisite Corpse and
daydream about the boys they fancy. When they hit eighteen they are
conscripted into the army.
Stuck on checkpoint duty with fellow soldiers she hates, Lea
relieves her boredom by creating an imaginary family life for a
dishevelled Palestinian man that passes every day; Yael takes to
sleeping with a boy she is training, in between breaking up and
getting back together with her boyfriend at home; and Avishag's days
are spent guarding the Egyptian border, catching smugglers and
watching Sudanese refugees throw themselves on the barbed wire fence.
They wait in the dust for something to happen, caught in that
single, intense second before danger erupts.
Shani Boianjiu was born in 1987 in Jerusalem, and she served in the
Israeli Defense Forces for two years. Her fiction has been published in
Vice
magazine,
Zoetrope
and the
New Yorker
. Shani is the youngest recipient ever of the US National Book
Foundation's 5 under 35 Award. She lives in Israel. This is her first
novel.
