The People of Forever are not Afraid
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction
Yael, Avishag and Lea grow up together in a tiny, dusty village in Israel. They attend high school, gossip about boys, and try to find ways to alleviate the universal boredom of teenage life. Then at eighteen they are conscripted into the army.
Yael trains marksmen, Avishag stands guard watching refugees throw themselves at barbed-wire fences and Lea, posted at a checkpoint, imagines the stories behind the familiar faces that pass by her day after day. All of them live in that single intense second before danger erupts, all of them trying to survive however they can…
Shortlisted for The Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Here's what we all know about Israel: it's constantly preparing for war, fighting a war, and recovering from war. And everyone, male or female (except the ultra-Orthodox), serves in the Israeli Defense Forces. Here's what we probably don't know, and what Boianjiu's impressive debut gives us some inkling of: what it's like to be a teenage girl in the army. Yael, Avishag, and Lea, who grew up together in a tiny town built on the Israel-Lebanon border to "jewdify the Galilee," join up in time for the 2006 war with Lebanon. They train men to shoot, do guard duty, and work on a checkpoint: their days are boring, funny, occasionally dangerous, and frequently surreal. Sometimes the three girls blur together, but mostly Boianjiu's in control of what she wants to blur. Her POV shifts and rapid-fire language reflect the ongoing merger of ordinary life and PTSD and how the heightened awareness of a country on permanent alert turns into a kind of moral slackness, with results that range from inconsequential to horrifying. If at times we aren't sure whether to believe some of the more extreme details, that blur between what we suspect is false but fear is true is likely deliberate, another thing Boianjiu wants us to understand about this country we talk about so much and know so little about.