A Lake Beyond the Wind

The year is 1948; the place, Samakh, a small town on Lake Tiberias, north of Jerusalem. People in Samakh are waiting -- for what, exactly, they do not yet know. The whistle of the Haifa-Deraa train doesn't sound anymore. Abd al-Karim, the shopkeeper, no longer goes into the city to buy new stock. "You townspeople, " says Haj Mahmoud, leader of the fighters in the 1936 rebellion, "had better start digging trenches. There are dark days ahead." A Lake Beyond the Wind is a novel about the most ...