All the Rivers by Dorit Rabinyan
Are there borders love cannot cross?
All the Rivers is a passionate story about two young people falling in love in New York City. There’s just one problem: she is Israeli and he is Palestinian.
When Liat meets Hilmi, she is drawn to him despite all her reservations and unwillingness. As they together explore the city and one another, it becomes painfully clear that they can’t prevent themselves from falling hopelessly in love. Set against the backdrop of the beautiful Big Apple, Liat and Hilmi talk, laugh and reminisce about their lives, their past and their conflicted homelands.
As summer is approaching, with Liat’s impending return to Israel, her guilt about hiding their love affair from her parents is ever increasing. She must decide if she wants to risk having herself outed from her family and community for the love that she feels for Hilmi.
All the Rivers is a beautiful and sad story about forbidden love, written poetically and inextricably linked to the cities in which it is set.
Themes:
Love
Culture clash
Fear
Humanity
Social conventions/structures
Divisions
Shame
Fear
Guilt
Favourite quote from the book:
“How do I describe him now? Where do I start? How do I distill the first impression created in those few distance seconds? How do I extract his finished portrait, composed of layer upon layer of color, back into the pale, hasty pencil sketch that my eyes drew the first time they landed on him? How can I use a mere few lines to paint the whole picture with all its breadth and depth? Is it even possible to attain that sort of scrutiny, that measure of lucidity, when the hands of loss keep touching the memory, staining it with their fingerprints?”
About the author:
Dorit Rabinyan is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. Her novel Persian Brides won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize in 1999. All the Rivers was awarded the prestigious Bernstein Prize, was translated into seventeen languages and became an international bestseller.
Where to buy:
Foyles
Waterstones
Wordery
LittleWordNerd Rating: 3.5/5
