Pick, A: Strangers with the Same Dream

A dystopian reimagining of the founding of a kibbutz in 1920s Palestine from the Booker longlisted author of FAR TO GO.

'We came into their valley at dawn.'  From three vastly different points of view, Alison Pick relates the story of a group of Jewish pioneers, many escaping violent homelands, who have come together to found a kibbutz on a patch of land that will later become part of Israel. with tightly controlled intensity, Pick takes us into three very different minds to show us how a utopian dream is punctured by messy human entanglements.  Yet this is also the story of the land itself (present-day Israel and Palestine), revealing the way the newcomers chose to ignore the fact that their valley was already populated, home to a people that the pioneers did not want to see.

In writing of extraordinary, at time heartbreaking power, Pick has created unforgettable characters, haunted by ghosts and compromised by unbearable secrets.  The novel's shocking conclusion is a tour de force, the work of a writer uniquely in control of her craft an with an extraordinary insight into the innermost workings of the human heart.

A riveting, timely novel that takes an essential moment in Jewish history and allows it to blaze into being in all its strange and glorious complexity.  Alison Pick has a way of reinventing the historical novel again and again - Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation