Sammy and Anna Ostrove raised a typical Jewish family in Winnipeg: Marilyn, the older daughter who is a successful lawyer and Teddy, a son who was to be a doctor. Life, of course, had other plans. Marilyn just ended an affair that should have been kept a secret. Teddy, who dropped out of medical school, went on a ten-day Birthright Israel tour where he got himself mixed up with gush shalom Israelis who introduced him to a diaspora Palestinian woman visiting her ailing grandmother in Ramallah. While Marilyn is headed for divorce, Teddy falls in love with the woman he calls his "Palestinian princess" — and now she's having their baby.
Sammy, who fought in Israel in '48 but moved back home to Winnipeg years ago, a move he has regretted, is forced into an angry struggle with his son that reveals all their unresolved conflicts. A funny and poignant novel, The Briss explores, on a personal level, family relationships, and on a political level, the continuing debate about Jewish identity and its connection to Israel and Palestine.

Michael Tregebov was born in 1954 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He graduated from the University of Manitoba with a BA in English. His first book of poems, Changehouse, was published by Turnstone Press in Winnipeg in 1976. That same year he began an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.
He received his MFA in Creative Writing in spring 1978, immediately after which he moved to Barcelona, where he learned Spanish and, accidentally, Catalan. He returned to Vancouver in 1979 and begin a Masters in English at Simon Fraser University. After dropping out of SFU he returned to Barcelona in the fall of 1981, where he has made his home ever since.
In addition to teaching English and Spanish translation and 19th and 20th century American literature at the American Institute of Barcelona (Institut d'Estudis Nordamericans) from 1984–88; and at the neo–liberal Jesuit–run ESADE from 1989 until his retirement in 2005. During that time and until the present he has translated and dubbed Spanish travel programs and industrial American TV shows, including a hundred episodes of Star Trek (both generations) and The Equalizer into Catalan and Spanish, a million–plus words in corporate, tax and labour law and another million in chartered accountancy for PriceWaterhouseCoopers Spain, the capitalist police, as well as a book of essays (Escribir y ser) by Nadine Gordimer, and translations in areas stretching from art history to perfume.
In 2009, his novel The Briss was short–listed for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (first novel category) and optioned for film. The Briss was followed by The Shiva in 2012. In 2015 Penguin Random House Lumen published his translation of, and prologue to, William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell in their best–selling William Carlos Williams Poesía reunida, chosen by El País as one of the best books released in Spain and Latin America in 2015. Shot Rock is his third novel.
Michael Tregebov lives with Virginia, his wife of 39 years, in El Masnou, a Catalan coastal town just north of Barcelona.

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