A PALESTINE AFFAIR

Set in Palestine in the early 1920s, Jonathan Wilson's second novel is about three characters whose fates interlock in a devastating counterpoint to the tense political situation there. Robert Kirsch is a British Jew working for the Palestinians as a police detective. Mark Bloomberg is a failed (and depressed) London painter hired to paint the Zionist settlements in Palestine, who is alienated from his non-Jewish wife Joyce, an American interested in the Zionist cause. When a local journalist is murdered, the stories of all concerned converge, and each is forced to seek a kind of redemption in an unexpected place. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.