The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land

Book excerpt: 'In these wise, capacious, achingly beautiful stories, Omer Friedlander maps the hidden geography of the human heart like a young Chekhov' ANTHONY MARRA 'A beautiful debut by a deeply humane writer. Every story is a vivid world unto itself, intensely felt, and often revelatory' NICOLE KRAUSS A divorced con-artist and his young daughter sell empty bottles of 'holy' air to credulous tourists. In a bombed-out Beirut radio station, a Lebanese Scheherazade enchants three young soldiers with her nightly tales. Ahead of a school 'Show and Tell', two brothers kidnap a Shoah survivor from a supermarket to pose as their grandfather. An Israeli volunteer at a West Bank checkpoint mourns the death of her son, a soldier killed in Gaza. From the limestone alleyways of Jerusalem to the desolate Negev Desert and the sprawling orange groves of Jaffa, Omer Friedlander's stories are fairy tales turned on their head by the stakes of real life, where moments of fragile intimacy mix with comedy and notes of the absurd. Casting his eye, not on the region's conflicts, but on the hopes and failures of its people, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land is at times darkly funny, at others quietly devastating.