During the Six Day War, an Israeli general found an abandoned house and made it his home. Forty years later, the general, along with his imaginative and distant son Alex, live in peaceful solitude. When a Palestinian writer shows up with is daughter and lays claim to the house he left decades ago, an internal house war ensues. The bathroom is seized, a fig tree is destroyed, and the basement becomes a shrine in the resulting chaos. Relenting, both men strike a deal to share the house. Somehow these two families are going to have to live together—if they don’t kill each other first.

JONATHAN GARFINKEL is an award-winning author. His plays include Cockroach (adapted from the novel by Rawi Hage) and House of Many Tongues, nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. The controversial The Trials of John Demjanjuk: A Holocaust Cabaret has been performed across Canada, Russia, Ukraine, and Germany. He is the author of the poetry collection Glass Psalms and the chapbook Bociany. His memoir, Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel/Palestine Divide, has been published in numerous countries to wide critical acclaim, and his long-form nonfiction has appeared in the Walrus, Tablet, the Globe and Mail, and PEN International, as well as Cabin Fever: An Anthology of the Best New Canadian Non-Fiction. Named by the Toronto Star as “one to watch,” Garfinkel is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of Medical and Health Humanities at the University of Alberta, where he is writing a memoir about life with type 1 diabetes and the revolutionary open-source Loop artificial pancreas system. He lives in Berlin and Toronto.

Jonathan Garfinkel's profile page

• Short-listed, Governor General's Literary Award for Drama

“Playwright Jonathan Garfinkel attacks the Israeli- Palestinian question through laughs and magic realism.”
—Jon Kaplan, NOW Magazine