A chance meeting in Jerusalem between a man and his former lover, now a married Orthodox Jew, brings unexpected peace.

Confident, original and humane, the stories in The Best Place on Earth are peopled with characters at the crossroads of nationalities, religions and communities: expatriates, travellers, immigrants and locals. In illustrating the lives of those whose identities swing from fiercely patriotic to powerfully global, The Best Place on Earth explores Israeli history as it illuminates the tenuous connections—forged, frayed and occasionally destroyed—between cultures, between generations and across the gulf of transformation and loss.

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Ayelet Tsabari is the author of the memoir in essays The Art of Leaving, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, and The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature, and an Apple Books and Kirkus Review Best Book of 2019. She co-edited with Leonarda Carranza and Eufemia Fantetti the anthology Tongues, On Longing and Belonging through Language.

Her first book, The Best Place On Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. The book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, Kirkus Review’s Best Debut Fiction of 2016, was nominated for The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and has been published internationally to great acclaim.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University’s Writer’s Studio and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, Ayelet teaches at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph, at University of King’s College’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Track in Creative Writing in Bar Ilan University.

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