About this item
Through a largely hidden ceremony ... four friends discover the true meaning of life.It's 2006 in a seaside village in Israel, where a war is brewing. Lauren, Emily, Aviva and Rachel, four memorable women from different backgrounds, are drawn to the village. Lauren, a maternity nurse, loves her Israeli doctor husband but struggles to make a home for herself in a foreign land miles away from her beloved Boston. Seeking a fresh start after divorce, her vivacious friend Emily follows. Strong, sensuous Aviva, brought to Israel years earlier by intelligence work, has raised a family and now lost a son. And Rachel, a beautiful, idealistic college graduate from Wyoming, arrives with her hopeful dreams.The women forge a friendship that sustains them as they come to terms with love and loss, and the outbreak of war.
About the Author
Diana Bletter is the author of the novel, A Remarkable Kindness (HarperCollins, August 2015) . Her first book, The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women, (written in collaboration with prize-winning photographer Lori Grinker) was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award. Her self-published memoir, The Mom Who Took Off On Her Motorcycle, has been featured on The Jerusalem Post and Diana's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, Glamour, beliefnet. com, tabletmag. org, The Forward, The North American Review, The Reading Room, Huffington Post and has been anthologized. Her story, "One Kiss, One Baby, One God," appeared in Commentary Magazine, January 2015. She is also First Prize winner of Family Circle Magazine's 2011 Fiction Contest. Diana grew up on Long Island and attended Cornell University. After graduating with distinction, she went on to work for several newspapers and magazines, including National Lampoon. A wanderer who likes the expatriate life, she has lived in Paris and Rome and now makes her home in a small beach village on the Mediterranean Sea in northern Israel where she and her husband raised six children and an unofficially adopted daughter from Ethiopia. Diana is a member of a burial circle, and drew on her personal experiences in her novel, A Remarkable Kindness. She also participates in a Jewish-Muslim-Druze-Christian women??s group in Israel dedicated to forging connections among women, remaining idealistic about hope for peace in the Middle East ?? despite all evidence to the contrary. A tomboy who snowboards, climbs trees and participates in sprint triathlons, she also speaks French, Spanish, Italian, Yiddish and Hebrew and is now learning Arabic, committed to speaking as many foreign languages as possible with the same Americano accent. Find out more about Diana Bletter's writing at , where her blog features interviews with writers. The blog is about writing--and living--your best chapter.
