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    City of a Thousand Gates: A Novel
    City of a Thousand Gates: A Novel
    City of a Thousand Gates: A Novel
    Audiobook13 hours

    City of a Thousand Gates: A Novel

    Written by Bee Sacks

    Narrated by Lameece Issaq

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “A stunning first novel…imbued with foreboding at every turn…Through her vibrant characters, Sacks paints a moving and powerful portrait of those who love the region passionately despite its many tensions and dangers.”                                                   --Booklist (Starred Review)

    ""A beautifully written, brave, and incredibly compassionate novel. I couldn’t put it down.”             --Etaf Rum

    ""Sacks deeply humanizes a conflict that dehumanizes on every level.”                                                --Nicole Krauss                  


    Brave and bold, this gorgeously written novel introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them.

    Hamid, a college student, has entered Israeli territory illegally for work. Rushing past soldiers, he bumps into Vera, a German journalist headed to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy beaten into a coma by a group of revenge-seeking Israeli teenagers. On her way to the hospital, Vera runs in front of a car that barely avoids hitting her. The driver is Ido, a new father traveling with his American wife and their baby. Ido is distracted by thoughts of a young Jewish girl murdered by a terrorist who infiltrated her settlement. Ori, a nineteen-year-old soldier from a nearby settlement, is guarding the checkpoint between Bethlehem and Jerusalem through which Samar—Hamid’s professor—must pass. 

    These multiple strands open this magnificent and haunting novel of present-day Israel and Palestine, following each of these diverse characters as they try to protect what they love. Their interwoven stories reveal complicated, painful truths about life in this conflicted land steeped in hope, love, hatred, terror, and blood on both sides.

    City of a Thousand Gates brilliantly evokes the universal drives that motivate these individuals to think and act as they do—desires for security, for freedom, for dignity, for the future of one’s children, for land that each of us, no matter who or where we are, recognize and share. 

    Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateFeb 2, 2021
    ISBN9780063011502
    Author

    Bee Sacks

    Bee Sacks (they/she) holds an MFA from the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Their debut novel, City of a Thousand Gates, was awarded the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction in 2023. A former journalist, they worked at Vanity Fair for several years before moving to Israel/Palestine to study sacred Jewish texts. Bee now lives in Los Angeles with their dog, Pupik.

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    Reviews for City of a Thousand Gates

    3.5/5

    21 ratings5 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wie ein Bad in Sprache! Bin mir nicht sicher was hier besser ist: der Text oder der Vortrag ? Toll geschrieben und phantastisch gelesen; ganz nebenbei lernt man auch noch eine Menge über Israelis und Palästinenser, ganz ohne politische Agenda, rein menschlich. Super !
    • 2/5
      This was a slog for me. I was really excited to read this book as I wanted to understand more of what it was like to live in Israel and to navigate the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. However, after the first part where there was intersection between characters, it went downhill for me. Much too much info on the sex lives that had no bearing on the story. It took forever to get through this, although it wasn't really long. I wanted to put it down multiple times, but I thought that after a promising beginning, it was going to get better. Sadly, it didn't for me. It just wasn't the book for me.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful weaving of the stories of various fictional Israelis and Palestinians taking the conflict from news to heart.
    • 4/5
      I liked the premise of this book which sounded a great deal like Colm McCann's "Apierogon" which I absolutely loved. This also consists of short chapters told from the viewpoint of various Palestinians and various Jews with a young German journalist thrown in.The various names of the characters was almost overwhelming at times and some of the chapters just didn't seem that relevant - another book with what seemed like gratuitous sex thrown in. There are checkpoints, bombings, happy couples, Jewish mothers, unfeeling guards, etc. Ok, not great, but just another look at the terrible unsolvable mess in Israel (Did get a better picture of the settler issue)
    • 5/5
      Rebecca Sacks debut novel is an ambitious one. She tackles the job of giving readers a glimpse of life on the West Bank of Israel for 29 people. Included are Israelis and Arabs with diverse lifestyles and problems. She does an excellent job of being able to step into the minds of the people she writes about and share their points of view. She’s able to portray what drives people—economic security, religious freedom, dignity, their children’s future and land to call their own.