The man who sold air in the Holy Land

The young author's prose debut consists of short stories set in Israel and other places in the Middle East, but their themes are universal. In eleven stories, Omer Friedlander presents himself as a great storyteller with an extraordinary eye for detail. Thanks to his love of visual art, he is able to portray in his texts an extremely plastic atmosphere in which suffering, compassion and humour are intertwined in equal measure. His sometimes almost magical stories take us to the narrow streets of Jerusalem, the quiet, harsh beauty of the Negev desert and the sunlit orange groves of Jaffa.

 In the collection, we meet a divorced con man and his daughter, who sell bottles of "holy" air to gullible tourists, Lebanese Scheherazade telling her stories to three soldiers in a bombed-out radio building, boys, who climbs onto rooftops and cranes at night and in his imagination brings to life the courage of a Polish-Jewish dancer from the Holocaust, and a volunteer at an Israeli checkpoint, coping with the loss of her son killed in Gaza.

 The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land delivers a compelling mosaic of stories about how humans are imperfect and vulnerable, but all need some hope in life.