Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s fourth book sits somewhere between a novel of ideas, a thriller and a character study – a big old-fashioned work of literary fiction in a world where the trend is for the inward-looking. It opens with a bang, as Lilach (known as Leela) Shuster, an Israeli-American living with her husband, Mikhael, in California’s Silicon Valley, tells us that her son Adam, 16, has been accused of killing a Black boy from his school. “That’s not true,” Leela tells us – but she isn’t really sure.
Leela and Mikhael seem to have everything – money, good jobs, a house that makes their family back in Israel gawp – but they are unsettled. They have Americanised their names to fit in and feel further away from home than ever. “We raised an American child who went to high school with American children, and now they say he killed another American child.”
