Takes us on a journey through the author's childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother.

Alexander Cleave, actor, has left his career and his family behind and banished himself to his childhood home. He wants to retire from life, but finds this impossible in a house brimming with presences, some ghostly, some undeniably human.

Set in Jerusalem at the time of the Suez crisis, this is a study of a woman's retreat from an unhappy marriage into a private world of fantasy and repressed desires. Her subsequent mental breakdown is mirrored in the local scenes of disruption and violence caused by the coming war.

Following the bizarre accidental death of his wife, an Israeli secret agent retires to the suburbs. After a lifetime of uncovering other people's secrets, he is forced to look back at the lies he has told himself. The author's other books include My Michael and The Slopes of Lebanon .

As the Germans advance into Poland in 1939, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker, escapes into the forest, leaving behind his wife, Stepha. After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives in Israel where another war is brewing.