ABOUT
THE BOOK

In 2000, Richard Zimler met a talented Brazilian dancer. The tragic step she would take the next day was to launch him into an obsessive investigation of her past. He discovers a childhood in 1950s Israel, a time of peaceful tolerance between Arabs and Jews in Haifa. There, despite their ethnic and religious
differences, two girls — one Palestinian, one Israeli — forge a lifelong bond of sisterhood. Zimler’s quest uncovers the story of this friendship, even as it leads him into a web of illusion, cruelty and deceit, and finally to 11 September 2001, when the tragedy he witnessed a year earlier is set in the starkest of political contexts.