Mitla pass - Leon Uris

With unequalled power, Leon Uris gives us Mitla Pass, the impassioned story of Gideon Zadok, a modern man trapped by his own contradictions: ambition and fear; desire and obligation; the past and his future. Weaving a tapestry of voices – Gideon’s, his family’s, his wife’s, and friends’ – Uris takes us from the pogrom-cursed Russian shtetls to the American dream; from Hollywood in its heyday to the new state of Israel in 1956.

Gideon, the gifted young author of a successful World War II novel and former US Marine, succumbs to the lure of Hollywood and all but destroys his talent. Desperate to resurrect his career as a novelist, he travels to Israel with his wife and young daughters, determined to find material for a new book. What he finds is Natasha Solomon, a survivor of the Holocaust, and her disturbed passion for him unleashes his own smouldering desires. Torn by loyalty to his wife and the uncontrollable lust of his new soulmate, Gideon must come to grips with the frightening power of love.

On the eve of the ’56 Sinai War, Gideon evacuates his family, leaves Natasha and joins the Israeli paratroopers as an observer. He is dropped at the key junction of Mitla Pass, in the desert deep behind enemy lines. Wounded, waiting for the relief column to arrive, with the sounds of battle in his ears, Gideon wages a war no less violent within himself.

Breathtaking in scope, painfully human and alive with earthy humour, Mitla Pass is the masterwork of one of the world’s greatest novelists.