The Other End of the Sea

By Alison Glick

A STIRRING STORY OF LOVE DISCOVERED IN UNEXPECTED PLACES, GROWING US BEYOND WHO WE THOUGHT WE WERE—OR IMAGINED WE COULD BECOME

Summer, 1981—Following the death of her father, Becky Klein, an adventurous, naive young woman from the Midwest, sets out for the Middle East, in search of her Jewish roots. She discovers something more, in a Gaza garden near a refugee camp by the sea. There she befriends the garden’s owner, a Palestinian activist who has served time in Israeli jails. As their relationship grows, Rebecca finds herself drawn into a story of roots unlike the one she had imagined.

The West Bank, Cairo, Yarmouk, Benghazi, Beirut—before long, their romance careens across a region in flames, child in tow, wrestling with conflicting maps of love, family and home.

Moving, yet brimming with flashes of humor, Alison Glick’s tangle with the search for purpose and commitment yields a bracing, radiant story for these times.

Alison Glick journeyed in the early 1980s to Israel, where she lived in a kibbutz and in a town near Haifa. After studying Middle East history at Temple University, she returned and lived in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria for six years, working as a teacher, human rights researcher, and freelance writer. Alison’s writing has appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Mondoweiss. The Other End of the Sea is her first novel.