The Lover

March 1, 2023

While studying in Tel Aviv, Canadian Allison falls in love with Israeli soldier Eyal. They're inseparable whenever he's home on leave, but something dynamites their relationship after his troubled return from an invasion of Gaza. Following Sacks's debut, the Kafka Prize--winning City of a Thousand Gates. Prepub Alert.

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June 15, 2023
The love affair between a Canadian grad student and an Israeli soldier grows increasingly complicated. Sacks' latest novel begins with a deceptively simple premise: A young woman falls passionately in love with an even younger man. Allison is a grad student visiting Israel from Canada; Eyal is on the verge of invading Gaza. She's 27; he's 19. At first, the story seems basic to the point of clich�. But Sacks quickly veers into territory much more troubling and complex. Just as Eyal is beginning to question the Israeli army's actions in Gaza--and, by extension, his own--Allison is learning to silence her own questions. "I was finding that I liked myself better in Hebrew," she tells us, "a language in which I had so much less to say." Allison's family, we learn, isn't close--she and her sister have grown apart, and her parents are distant. In Israel, on the other hand, she finds herself fully embraced by both Eyal's family and the country at large: "Nothing in my whole life had ever felt as good as being welcomed not just into a family but into a people," she says. What's most disturbing in this brilliantly rendered book is not the age difference between the lovers, not the war, but the way that Allison gradually learns to manipulate her own thoughts. "I could say to myself, 'That was racist'; saying Death to Arabs is racist--but also," she thinks, "I understood the feelings behind the words." Desperate to belong, Allison engages in increasingly pliable mental gymnastics to justify her thoughts and actions. Sacks' depiction of those mental gymnastics is astounding. Sometimes, it's true, Sacks can be heavy-handed, repeating explicitly what is already implicitly clear. But this is a minor complaint. As a whole, the book--and Allison's transformation--is deeply unsettling, and Sacks' talent as a novelist who takes on thorny, multifaceted, unanswerable questions is clearly unmatched. A brilliantly rendered novel raises crucial questions about identity, justice, war, and belonging.

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June 19, 2023
The heroine of Sacks’s poignant second novel (after City of a Thousand Gates) revisits a summer romance with longing and the wisdom of hindsight. Allison, 35 and pregnant, discovers a dusty box while cleaning her Tel Aviv apartment. Its contents, which are revealed later in the narrative, trigger memories of an intense and emotionally complex relationship she had before she was married to her husband, Timor. Allison meets Eyal on a bus when she is 27, a graduate student about to return home to Canada after a semester in Israel, and he’s a 19-year-old soldier in uniform and holding a rifle. Both, at this point, have come to accept the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a part of their daily lives. Eyal’s closeness to his family prompts Allison to reconnect with her sister Erica, from whom she is somewhat estranged. Cultural differences and the age gap between the lovers also impact the relationship, and Sacks renders it all in sensual prose, as in this description of Eyal’s first impression of Allison: “So sweet, so out of place. That’s exactly what he wishes to be: out of place, out of here. Not part of the scenery but a person moving through it.” It adds up to a tender, affecting portrait of a bygone love.

Starred review from August 1, 2023
Sacks' follow-up to their powerful debut City of a Thousand Gates (2021) is a haunting portrait of a love affair against the backdrop of an Israeli incursion into Gaza. Canadian graduate student Allie, 27, is studying abroad for a semester in Israel when she meets handsome, 19-year-old Israeli soldier Eyal on a bus in Tel Aviv. Their attraction is instantaneous and all-consuming, and they enter into a love affair fueled by their mutual passion and intensified by the jeopardy inherent in Eyal's deployments as well as Allie's increasing assimilation into Israeli life and culture. When Allie opts to extend her stay in Israel, Eyal fears she is veering off track, but even he doesn't realize how enmeshed in Zionism Allie is becoming. When Eyal is deployed to Gaza after tensions mount, Allie channels her fears for him into the solidification of her stance on Palestinians. The novel builds to a stunning and unexpected climax, with the horrors of the on-going conflict bringing out very different reactions in the two leads. Nuanced and unsettling, Sacks' novel will resonate with readers long after they've turned the final page.

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