Strangers With The Same Dream

Strangers with the Same Dream by Alison Pick A brilliant
astonishing and politically timely page-turner set in 1921
Palestine from the author of the bestselling novel Far to
Go nominated for the Man Booker Prize. This spare
beautifully written shocking and timely novel whisks us
back to 1921 Palestine when a band of young Jewish
pioneers many escaping violence in their homelands set out
to realize a utopian dream: the founding of a kibbutz on a
patch of land that will twenty-five years later become
part of the State of Israel. Writing with tightly
controlled intensity Alison Pick takes us inside the minds
of her vastly different characters–two young unmarried
women one plain and one beautiful escaping peril in Russia
and Europe; one older man a charismatic group leader who
is married with two children; and his wife Hannah who
understands all too well the dark side of equality–to
show us how idealism quickly tumbles into pragmatism and
how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human
entanglements. This is also the story of the land itself
(present-day Israel and Palestine) revealing with
compassion and terrible irony how the pioneers chose to
ignore the subtle but undeniable fact that their valley
was already populated home to a people whose lives they
did not entirely understand. Writing with extraordinary
power Pick creates unforgettably human characters who
isolated in the enclosure of their hard-won utopian dream
are haunted by ghosts compromised by unbearable secrets
and finally despite flashes of love and hope worn down by
hardship human frailty and the pull of violent
confrontation. The novels utterly shocking but satisfying
conclusion will have readers flipping back to the first
page to trace patterns and wrestle with the question of
what is or is not inevitable and knowable in the human
heart.