Edeet Ravel was born on an Israeli kibbutz and now lives in Canada. Lily is a young emigrant student exploring the wonders and terrors of her new land when she meets the man of her dreams. Ami, a former actor, is handsome, intelligent and exciting – but, like his beautiful, disintegrating country, he has a terrible flaw – he is an army interrogator.

Exerpt: “Fashila is an Arabic word meaning to fail, lose courage, despair, be disappointed, act in a cowardly way. In Hebrew slang, fashla means mess-up, snafu, an embarrassing or disastrous or humiliating mistake. You can use it for small things, like forgetting you had to meet someone, or you can use it for big things like the Yom Kippur War. A box-cell is a cell that is five feet by five feet by two and a half feet. The person can’t stand up or stretch out. You find box-cells in most Israeli prisons: they’re punishment cells, and nobody lasts very long in them – people start going mad fast and they don’t want to go back in once they’ve been let out.”