L'attentat

Dr. Amin Jaafari is an Arab-Israeli surgeon who has built an enviable life in Tel Aviv: respected by his colleagues, a citizen of a country many of his fellow Arabs regard with suspicion, and married to a woman he adores. That life is annihilated in an instant when a suicide bombing tears through a restaurant full of families, and the police inform him that the bomber has been identified as his own wife, Sihem.

Unable to reconcile the woman he loved with the act she is accused of, Amin sets out to understand what he could have missed. His search takes him out of his comfortable Tel Aviv existence and into the Palestinian territories — Bethlehem, Jenin, and the networks of grievance, faith, and militancy he has spent his career trying to rise above — as he confronts questions of loyalty, identity, and how well any of us truly knows the people we love.

Part of Yasmina Khadra's loosely linked trilogy on the fault lines between the Muslim world and the West, The Attack is a spare, propulsive, and morally searching novel. It refuses easy answers about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using one man's private catastrophe to illuminate a much larger tragedy.