It took half an hour, but he found that bleeding branch and tied it off. Even Zakai himself might have failed here. For a moment, he was sorry he couldn’t tell him. In fact, he couldn’t tell anyone. The most glorious moment in his career, the moment that made studying medicine worthwhile. An operation that didn’t happen, on a patient that didn’t exist. And maybe it was better that way.

This book starts fast. On the first page, Eitan, a middle-age neurosurgeon runs over a man, an Eritrean immigrant, by accident. When he steps out of the car he realizes that the man is as good as dead, so instead of taking him to the hospital and facing the consequences (being sure nobody witnessed the accident), he leaves him lying in the middle of the road.

After that first page, the first chapter takes us to the day that led to the accident. We get to know that Eitan is a good and moral person, who ended up in Beersheba, a small city in the middle of the desert, because he caught his mentor and boss in one of the top hospitals in Tel Aviv receiving bribes. This led to Eitan’s dismissal after reporting it to the hospital administration. He also has a loving family, Liat, his wife, a detective in the Beersheba police, with whom he has a beautiful and trusting relationship and two young kids that love him.

However, the accident doesn’t go unnoticed. The morning after the accident, Sirkit, the dead man’s wife appears in Eitan’s life with a proposition that he cannot refuse. The same day his wife comes home with a  new exciting case; the investigation of a hit and run of an Eritrean man. Life as he knows it hangs on the balance.

Gundar-Goshen delivers a (somewhat slow-paced) thriller with amazingly complex characters, where nothing is black or white and every decision is driven by human flaws and passions. Each character has so many layers, which she captures with great precision. I loved seeing how each character presents herself to the world, then how they want to think, and finally how they actually think and act accordingly.

Besides the character development, another really interesting characteristic of the book is the hierarchies that exist everywhere in Israel, both socially and (for the characters) morally -to the point where I couldn’t determine if this characteristic is also in the author’s way of thinking or just in the character’s perception (if you read it, please let me know what you think)-. There are clear differences between being Jewish, Bedouins, and immigrants, and why they are “bad” and how they are “bad”. Privilege, religion, race, and class affect everything.

About Ayelet Gundar-Goshen 

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen was born in Israel in 1982, she is a novelist, screenwriter, and psychologist. Her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, won the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. Waking Lions is being adapted for a TV series in the US.

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Israeli initiatives and projects that support and empower girls and women  

Eritrean Women’s Community Center

Established in 2011 in Tel Aviv, the Eritrean Women’s Community Center is an initiative designed and run independently by a group of Eritrean refugee women. The center aims to provide Eritrean women with a safe space as well as access to important services. It uses a grass-roots approach to support Eritrean women in a fundamental way. They have 4 types of programs (vocational training, healthy families, women enrichment and individual support) and reach more than 800 women.