Sea of Stones

Nominated by Morris Philipson, Director of The University of Chicago Press, and Winner of Pushcart's twelfth annual Editors' Book Award, this timely and timeless novel impacts like today's news headlines. As The New York Times noted recently: "Now that the Israelis and the Palestinians have finally given each other official recognition, they are free to search for human recognition." Such human recognition is one of the enduring themes of The Sea af Stones, a bittersweet love story that spans decades, continents, and clashing cultures. This first novel also chronicles one woman's brave, desperate attempts to find her son in the slaughter of war. It is 1982. Freya, recently divorced, cares for her aging father in Chicago. Her only son, Noah, lives on a kibbutz. Without telling his mother, he has joined the Israeli army, now embroiled in a war in Lebanon. Freya flies to Israel to find him and along the way befriends an Israeli Arab woman. In Jerusalem, she resumes a romance with Asher, her lover from decades earlier and now a general in Israeli intelligence. With his help, she enters Lebanon. Freya, scared and in love - caught in a sea of bitter and bewitched personalities - struggles to save her son in a world of incomprehensible hostilities and carnage.