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Winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize
“The novel showcases the humanity, tragedy, and complexity of life in the West Bank…The characters' interwoven lives will stay with you long after the book's denouement.”
—Entertainment Weekly
Brave and bold, City of a Thousand Gates introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them.
Hamid, a college student, has entered Israeli territory illegally for work. Rushing past soldiers, he bumps into Vera, a German journalist headed to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy beaten into a coma by a group of revenge-seeking Israeli teenagers. On her way to the hospital, Vera runs in front of a car that barely avoids hitting her. The driver is Ido, a new father traveling with his American wife and their baby. Ido is distracted by thoughts of a young Jewish girl murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated her settlement. Ori, a nineteen-year-old soldier from a nearby settlement, is guarding the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem through which Samar—Hamid's professor—must pass.
These multiple strands open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine. Following each of its diverse characters in action, City of a Thousand Gates brilliantly evokes the fundamentally human drive at the heart of so much tragedy—the desire to protect what we love. The resulting interwoven narratives reveal complicated, painful truths about lives shaped by political violence.
Praise for City of a Thousand Gates:
“Reads devastatingly true…A novel that resists offering a false sense of hope in the face of conflict.”
— New York Times Book Review
“A nuanced, powerful portrait of what it means to be caught in the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank. I found myself and my family in the pages of this beautifully written, brave, and incredibly compassionate novel.”
— Etaf Rum
“An American novel that manages, for once, to get Israel right…I loved it…I was deeply appreciative of the care and nuance on every page, and the plot’s purposeful resolution.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Sacks is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose intelligence, compassion and skill on both the sentence and tension level rise to meet her ambition. She keeps us constantly on edge…City of a Thousand Gates makes a convincing case for a literature of multiplicity, polyphonic and clamorous, abuzz with challenges and contradictions, with no clear answers but a promise to stay alert to the world, in all its peril and vitality.”
— Washington Post