Coming Soon: The Flood

Is Jerusalem the centre of the world or the place where it will end? For the
people of this novel set around 1960 in the divided city, it is the end.
There is no way out. In front of them lies the border and no man’s land;
behind lies a nondescript little town and the road they won’t take away to
normality and the sea.

They are a colourful crew: refugees, Jews, Christians, run-away monks,
nuns, a restless polyglot kind of family - intellectual, artistic, theatrical
- who, by choice or accident, find themselves living at a dead end, near or
even right on top of the volatile border that cuts the city in two. The wound
is still new and won’t heal. So their lives, loves and jealousies are
shadowed by the ghosts of the people who, ten years before, abandoned the
houses where they now live, and the instability they experience in their
lives grows out of this landscape and its history.

The Eichmann trial, and preparations for it, pervades the book, as do
preparations for an outdoor staging of the medieval mystery play Noah’s Flood, adapted and set in
contemporary Jerusalem. The play contains a turbulent, quixotic, but also
serious warning. The waters could be here any day and who knows how to build
an ark?