From the author of the prize-winning The Rainy Season —a “sophisticated and suspenseful” ( The New York Times Book Review ) novel of love, fear, divided loyalties, ruined friendships, and personal sacrifice—against a backdrop of war in the Holy Land. One rainy night at a Jerusalem checkpoint, Israeli Lieutenant Ari Doron is ordered to refuse passage to a young Palestinian mother and her sick boy. The incident leads to a series of riots, and Doron finds himself pulled into the bitter political aftermath as battles and bus bombs explode around him. He is drawn to Marina, the boy’s mother. And though she is on the other side of the bloody struggle, she finds herself thinking of Doron as “her soldier.” In another place, at another time, they might have been lovers, but here their story moves toward a tragic conclusion with the kind of inevitability that war imposes. Marina’s father, an eminent Boston heart specialist and an outspoken Palestinian intellectual, is also sucked into the conflict he thought he had left behind long ago. Now, back in the streets of his youth, he must choose whether to support his old comrades as they manipulate his grandson’s story in an ugly propaganda campaign, or break with them and wreck his last remaining childhood friendship. Caught in history’s terrible catastrophe, all three become pawns for larger, inescapable forces. Martyrs’ Crossing “is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution” ( Entertainment Weekly ). “So precise, so startling, so unforgettable” ( Los Angeles Times ), it offers an unparalleled story of the ambiguities of war—of inarticulate longing and broken vows—set in the turbulence of Israel and the West Bank. Amy Wilentz is the author of The Rainy Season , Martyrs’ Crossing , and I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen . She has won the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Non-Fiction Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. She writes for The New Yorker and The Nation and teaches in the Literary Journalism program at UC Irvine. Martyrs’ Crossing CHAPTER ONE SHE WANTED TO BE LIFTED away from here by angels, plucked up into the empty sky. Failing angels, she would accept any transportation—no matter how mean, no matter how low. The crowd was squeezing the breath out of her, and Ibrahim’s hand kept almost slipping away. Marina picked him up so that she wouldn’t lose hold of him. He turned and twisted irritably in her arms. There was too much old sweat here, there were too many bodies close to hers, and the whole thing made her feel like retching, like running. Too many people were breathing down her neck, and whose breath was it? No one who knew her, no one she wanted to know. Strangers, foreigners, was how she thought of them, really, even though they were her own people, standing packed around her. Finally, she was sharing their predicament. She had always thought she wanted to. They were all treading dust out here on the Ramallah road under the blue winter sky, and Ibrahim was inhaling it, too, like fire. It was scratchy air. He coughed and coughed again, and squirmed in her arms, trying to see what was happening. He was pale and feverish, but there was strength in those little legs. Marina looked down at his flushed cheeks. She looked through the dust up at the sky and saw a string of faded plastic flags fluttering over the road, crisscrossing it. There was a picture of the Chairman on one side of each flag, and on the reverse, a picture of a jowly commando who had been assassinated more than ten years earlier. She felt an elbow grind into her side. No one liked to be this close to his fellow man—she could say that with certainty. A car alarm yowled. The crowd was approaching the yellow sign: PREPARE YOUR DOCUMENTS FOR INSPECTION. The sky overhead was clear, but there was a threat in the clouds piling up far out to the west over the distant sea. The wind whipped through the cypresses that scrabbled up a hill behind the low stores and houses. Straining toward the rickety watchtower that overlooked Shuhada checkpoint, the faces of the crowd, upturned and expectant, were like faces in religious paintings, the faces of believers waiting for a miracle. Just let me through, Marina thought. A man next to her coughed in Ibrahim’s face. Next time, get him out of there and over to us as fast as you can, Dr. Miller had said. He needs to be on the machines. He needs drips you can’t always get at your hospitals. He needs our nebulizers. She held Ibrahim tightly with one arm, and pushed his hair back from his eyes. He felt hot and he looked frightened, and this was a boy who did not scare easily. Not even when they went to visit Hassan in the prison on the other side. In order to see Daddy, they had to get through the checkpoint, find a taxi, drive into Jerusalem—and then, at the prison, pass through a reinforced steel door while men with big guns watched them and asked