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 beautifully written, shocking and timely novel whisks us back to 1921, when a band of young Jewish pioneers set out to realize a dream: the founding of a settlement on a patch of land that would, twenty-five years later, become Israel. One by one, we enter the minds of three compelling characters--Ida, an idealistic young woman escaping violence brewing in Europe; David, the charismatic and volatile group leader; and Hannah, a wife and mother struggling with her roles--to witness how the utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements. This is also the story of the land itself, revealing with compassion and irony how the pioneers chose to ignore the fact that their valley was already home to people whose lives they did not understand.

Writing with restrained power, award-winning novelist Alison Pick creates unforgettable characters who, isolated within their utopian dream, are haunted by ghosts, compromised by secrets, and finally, despite flashes of love and hope, worn down by hardship, human frailty, and the pull of violent confrontation. Her astonishing conclusion forces us to confront the question of what is truly knowable in the human heart.

Alison Pick's most recent novel is Far to Go, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction and nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Rights have been sold internationally and the book has been optioned for film. Pick was the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award winner for most promising unpublished writer under 35 in Canada. She has published one other novel, The Sweet Edge, and two poetry collections, The Dream World and Question & Answer. She is currently on the Faculty of the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts. Her memoir Between Gods, from which this essay is loosely excerpted, is forthcoming from Doubleday in 2014.

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ADVANCE PRAISE:

“Stunning. On one level, a fascinating novel about early kibbutz life, but more deeply, this is thought-provoking fiction that asks important, relevant questions about ideology, privacy, equality, idealism, power, corruption and war.” —Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows

“Strangers With the Same Dream explores the dark side of utopian longing with terrific sensitivity, intelligence and attention to beauty. Alison Pick is one of the wisest and most compassionate of writers.” —Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“A riveting, timely novel that takes an essential moment in history and allows it to blaze into being in all its strange and glorious complexity. Alison Pick has a way of reinventing the novel again and again.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation