Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2000.
It is April 1946 and armies of men and women are on the move across Europe, intent on coming home - if they have homes left to go to. Evelyn Sert, a young hairdresser from Soho, is soon to arrive in the glittering white Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv, where Jewish refugees and idealists from all over Europe are gathering to forge not only the new Jew but a modern consciousness on the edge of the Middle East.
For Evelyn, adept at disguises, it is a time when anything seems possible - the new self, new Jew, new woman are all feasible. Together with her lover Johnny, she is drawn into the heart of the struggle. But like the fate of the modernist architecture of the city, all these dreams will turn out to be not quite what the pioneers and refugees had imagined.
