The silver medalist in the 2022 California Book Awards category of first fiction, Rebecca Sacks will join us via Zoom to discuss her book City of a Thousand Gates. 

She has written a relevant novel that introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting (Israel) where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them. The multiple strands of the various characters' lives open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine, following each of the diverse characters as they try to protect what they love. Their interwoven stories reveal complicated, painful truths about life in this conflicted land steeped in hope, love, hatred, terror, and blood on both sides. The book brilliantly evokes the universal drives that motivate these individuals to think and act as they do—desires for security, for freedom, for dignity, for the future of one’s children, for land that each of us, no matter who or where we are, recognize and share.