Praise: REVIEWS and PRAISE
From NPR's "All Things Considered" on November 1, 2002.
ALAN CHEUSE reporting:
Using an inheritance from her late grandfather, a Jewish-American woman named Eve Cavell moves to Jerusalem. Her grandfather had once quoted the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai about this fabled location, and the image burned into her mind. Jerusalem: all these stones, all this sadness, all this light.
Upon Eve's arrival in the divided city, the place immediately takes on a life and light, and she becomes the catalyst for quickly proliferating and intersecting lines of force. She is wooed by a handsome, young Palestinian man, taken under the wing of an elderly Hungarian-born novelist whose long-dead wife she resembles. An Israeli plainclothesman falls for her hard, while she herself falls deeply in love with her troubled new home: the streets, the smells, the sounds, the evidence of war.
'How can the future happen with so much history clinging to the stones?' That's the lament of a young Palestinian girl, the sister of Eve's devoted Palestinian admirer. And it's a question the novelist tries to dramatize, creating the intense atmosphere of an unstable work with grace and a kind of lyric power.
'All these stones. All this sadness. All this light.' Germaine Shames evokes enough of this beautiful and troubled place to make her fist novel a memorable little invention.
Reviewed by Alan Cheuse, teacher of writing at George Mason University in Virginia.
Copyright 2002 National Public Radio
“ . . .evocative plea for the power of love in the heart of Middle East turmoil . . .richly textured.”— Kirkus Reviews
“Shames, a former Middle East correspondent, handles the complexities of Eve's visit to war-torn Jerusalem with a subtlety seldom seen in this genre. She is careful not to pass judgment on either side of the political equation as she skillfully intertwines the lives of this diverse cast of characters to produce a tightly executed, emotion-filled work. Shames avoids the temptation of offering trite reflections on the region's ongoing conflict and shuns the sort of moralizing that might have marred her sensual prose, making this streamlined debut a timely book of modest beauty.” —Publishers Weekly
Between Two Deserts
By Germaine W. Shames
August 03, 2002ISBN: 1-931561-13-3
Format: Hardcover Genre: Fiction Pages: 153
Price: $24.00
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Buy this book at: BookSense.com
About the Book
Jerusalem lies at the end of an ancient Roman road, a city swathed in light and sorrow.Coming to Jerusalem to fulfill her grandfather's dying wish, Eve Cavell finds herself poised on the seam of three worlds—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish. Inspired rather than frightened by the ghosts and warring children that surround her, Eve emerges from mourning to a life larger for its dangers. The lost and alone—an Australian street preacher; a handsome apathetic Palestinian; an alienated Israeli investigator; and others—beat a path to her door. Soon she attracts the attention of Mozes Koenig, an elderly Hungarian author in search of a heroine. Eve, with her lodestar eyes and solitary dance, captivates the old man's imagination, and together they create an opus to humanity in a city made of stone.