Imagine your own home surrounded by roadblocks and tanks, your water turned off and the cashpoints empty. What would you do next?A young journalist, recently married with a new baby, is seeking a quieter life away from the city and has bought a large new house in his parent's hometown, an Arab village in Israel. Nothing is as they remember: everything is smaller, the people petty and provincial and the villagers divided between sympathy for the Palestinians and dependence on the Israelis.Suddenly and shockingly, the village becomes a pawn in the power struggles of the Middle East. When Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly tense, our hero is forced to confront what it means to be human in an inhuman situation.

Sayed Kashua was born in 1975 in Galilee and studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He writes a weekly column forHa'aretz, Israel's most prestigious newspaper, and lives with his wife and two children in Beit-Safafa, an Arab village within Jerusalem. His first novel,Dancing Arabs, was a San Francisco Book of the Year and was translated into eight languages.