A Road from Damascus

Set in the 1980s, A Road from Damascus ventures behind daily news of the Middle East - images of killings, assassinations, bombings and faltering peace talks - to tell the story of ordinary Israelis & Palestinians caught up in the area's political quagmire. The story of a Palestinian family and an Israeli family driven apart by the Arab-Israeli conflict emerges as a British diplomat attempts to reverse his dwindling career fortunes by exploiting his daughter's friendship with an Australian archaeologist. The archaeologist's friendship with an influential Palestinian businessman reveals the saga of the two families who for decades had been friends and neighbours in Jerusalem until Israel was founded in 1948. After decades apart, the separate ways of the families cross briefly and tragically. The encounter focuses attention on the elusiveness of truth in the Middle East. Despite the undoubted tragedy of the Arab-Israeli dispute, the novel captures the humour, irony and fatalism of the area and its people, whose resilience belies the seriousness of the conflict.