A Palestine Affair

In British-occupied Palestine after World War I, Mark Bloomberg, a beleaguered London painter, and Joyce, his American wife, witness the murder of a prominent Orthodox Jew. Joyce, a non-Jew and ardent Zionist, is drawn into an affair with the British investigating officer, while Mark seeks solace in the exotic colors and contours of the Middle Eastern landscape. Each of the three has come to Palestine to escape grief, and yet—caught in the crosshairs of history—they will all be forced to confront the very issues they hoped to leave behind in this swift and sensuous novel of artful concealment and roiling passions.

Jonathan Wilson was born in London in 1950 and educated at the universities of Essex, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has lived in the United States since 1976, with a four-year interlude in Jerusalem. He is the author of two previous works of fiction, The Hiding Room and Schoom. His stories, articles, essays, and reviews have appeared frequently in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere. He held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 1994. He is chair of the English Department at Tufts University and lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and their two sons.