Thriller time.
“Few American writers have spent as much time trying to make sense of political violence in the Middle East as Lawrence Wright. The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Looming Tower, Wright has spent decades reporting on the violent forces that have shaped the modern Middle East. His new novel, The Human Scale, he says, is an attempt to tell the story of Israel and Palestine in a way that his reporting never could, following a Palestinian American FBI agent investigating a murder in Hebron, a city that Wright visited and describes as a microcosm of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But in the months before the book’s release, the real-world events of Oct. 7 and the subsequent war in Gaza forced Wright to revisit his manuscript and wrestle with how his story fits into a rapidly shifting reality.” ~Aymann Ismail, Slate
“The loss of a single life — the murder of Jacob Weingarten, an Israeli police chief in a West Bank settlement — sets in motion Lawrence Wright’s gripping new novel, “The Human Scale.” The story centers on the relationship between Tony Malik, an Arab American F.B.I. agent, and Yossi Ben-Gal, a world-weary Israeli cop. When Tony arrives in Israel, he is rehabilitating after a terrorist-planted bomb nearly killed him. He has come to reconnect with his extended family at a wedding, but when Weingarten is murdered, Tony becomes involved in Yossi’s investigation, one that takes us right up to the Oct. 7 attacks.” ~Eliot Ackerman, NYT
