Martyrs' Crossing

By Amy Wilentz, the acclaimed author of the prize-winning The Rainy Season, Martyrs' Crossing tells a stunning story of love, fear, divided loyalties, ruined friendships, and personal sacrifice — against a backdrop of raging war in the Holy Land.

One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him.

He is drawn to Marina, the boy's American-born mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as "her soldier." In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes.

Marina's father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandson's story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship.

Caught in history's terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces.

Martyrs' Crossing is a poignant story of the ambiguities of war — of inarticulate longing and broken vows — set in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank.

"Powerful and poetic...[Wilentz's] storytelling propels you headfirst into another world." Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief

"So precise, so startling, so unforgettable....These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz make them live." Los Angeles Times

"A graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East....[This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution." Entertainment Weekly

"With intensity and skill, Amy Wilentz manages to show us the internal life of characters who are usually seen as journalistic subjects, those struggling in the complex and highly charged world of the Palestinians and Israelis. A deeply personal and tragic incident is at the center of this novel. The backdrop is one of political and social conflict, but the subject turns out to be the wider one of being human — of the difficulty of enduring loss and of trying to live by one's beliefs when all the world seems to be against you." Susan Minot, author of Lust & Other Stories

"The strength of Martyrs' Crossing...[is] its authentic and persuasive portraits of people trying to find their way through, and possibly past, the traps of history." Time

Amy Wilentz won the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for nonfiction and the Whiting Writers Award, and was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. She is the author of The Rainy Season, and has written for The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. She was the Jerusalem correspondent for The New Yorker from 1995 to 1997. She lives in New York City with her husband and three sons.