Apeirogon

Timing can be everything. I love all of Colum McCann’s work, so it’s not surprising that he would top this list. But I happened to be reading this title, a fictionalized account of a true story, not long before Hamas stormed into Israel.

The story centers on the profound human pain this conflict creates. It offers hope and optimism in the stories of two fathers, one Israeli and one Palestinian, who create a close and enduring friendship amid horrifying losses— the violent deaths of their daughters. The narrative beautifully describes the trauma, tragedies, and transformations the men and their families… show more.

The perilous distances traveled in this intense, genre-bending novel are likewise abbreviated – sometimes measured in meters, between Israel and Palestine, but they are as fraught with peril as any thousand-mile survival trek. Based on the author-embellished experiences of two men, one of whom is Israeli, the other Palestinian, who also appear as themselves in factual passages, the book mixes fiction and nonfiction to magnify the drama of traveling back and forth between two adjacent, lethally fractious zones. An unexpected friendship develops between the two men after each loses a daughter to terror violence perpetrated by the other side, which… show more.