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Synopsis

Message in a Bottle by Valerie Zenatti

Following a suicide bomb attack on her local Jerusalem cafe, in which she and her friends could so easily have been its victims, a seventeen-year-old Israeli schoolgirl decides to send a message in a bottle to Gaza. An act of hope and desperation, Tal believes that by making contact with a Palestinian she will be able to begin a dialogue through which experiences can be shared, and, just possibly, some kind of mutual understanding achieved. Her message is found by a young man who calls himself Gazaman, and a remarkable email correspondence begins ...This is a mesmerising account of a turbulent relationship conducted between two people whose dialogue is in itself an act of revolution against the situations in which they both feel themselves to be trapped.

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Reviews

Praise for When I Was a Soldier: 'When so much teen fiction runs along a single monotonous track, it's refreshing to read a book from a totally different perspective.
Sunday Telegraph
'Zenatti's even-handed and undramatic narration makes it reasonably easy to leave preconceptions behind, and this accessible read teams with questions that readers will quickly realise relate directly to them.'
Children
's Book of the Week, Guardian 'The book is an extraordinary insight into the psyche of a tiny nation that feels it must always be prepared for war. It brilliantly captures the mixture of the scary and surreal that comprises life for the young soldier.'
Harpers
& Queen 'Zenatti sketches the history of the Middle East crisis as succinctly as possible without oversimplification. Yet her novel never trivialises or cheapens the grim, intractable situation by using it as the context for a will they, won't they? love story
Financial Times

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About The Author

Valérie Zenatti was born in Nice on April Fool’s Day 1970. When she was thirteen she went to live with her parents in Israel, where she did her national service, which inspired her novel, When I was a Soldier. Even now she doesn’t go out without her survival kit — these days of a book, a notepad and a pen. Valérie now lives in Paris, where she works as a translator of Hebrew. She is also writing screenplays based on two of her books, Late for War and Message in a Bottle. Valérie is continually surprised and delighted at seeing Lucas, aged eight, and Nina, nearly two, grow up.

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