The attack

Raw, powerful, emotional, bare, hard-hitting...certainly the anti-thesis to "Austenland." The attack by Yasmina Khadra has been on my "to read" list for months but it took the right frame of mind to start the book. Once I started, I was drawn in right away, but it certainly wasn't a pretty world to be drawn into.

Dr. Amin Jaafari is an Arab-Israeli surgeon at a Tel Aviv hospital. Right away, that tells you that his priorities are for life and health and certainly not for continued racial/religious conflict. Jaafari spends his days putting people back together. He has friends and relatives on both sides of the conflict but, for the most part, they aren't active participants.

In chapter one, Jaafari and colleagues work long and hard to save those wounded in a nearby suicide bombing. By the end of chapter two, he finds out that his wife is among the dead. Three pages into chapter three, he's told that authorities suspect his wife was the bomber. What follows in the remaining 220 pages is Dr. Jaafari's struggle to make sense of the accusation.

Jaafari thought his wife was happy. He thought she, like him, was religiously lapsed. He thought she enjoyed their life together. He loved her more than life itself and thought she felt the same way about him...so how could this have happened? How could there be any truth in what they were saying? Could he be that ignorant of the inner struggles and desires of someone he had lived with for so long?

As I said at the outset, this novel is raw and hard-hitting but it's also illuminating, thought-provoking, compelling, personal, real, and strong. What does it take to make a suicide bomber? Who pays the toll? How do you break the cycle of conflict? Those are only a very few of the questions that flood this novel, and some of them get answers.

Not for the faint-of-heart, but very highly recommended for all others, if you like this one, you should also try "The cellist of Sarajevo" by Steven Galloway as well as Khadra's earlier book, "The swallows of Kabul."

The attack by Yasmina Khadra (translated from the French by John Cullen). Published in 2005 by Doubleday. ISBN: 978-0-385-51748-3.