Richard Zimler — The Search for Sana

Constable 2005 Paperback, 245pp. In 2000, Richard Zimler met a talented Brazilian dancer. The tragic step she would take the next day was to launch him into an obsessive investigation of her past. He discovers a childhood in 1950s Israel, a time of peaceful tolerance between Arabs and Jews in Haifa. There, despite their ethnic and religious differences, two girls -- one Palestinian, one Israeli -- forge a lifelong bond of sisterhood. Zimler's quest uncovers the story of this friendship, even as it leads him into a web of illusion, cruelty and deceit, and finally to 11 September 2001, when the tragedy he witnessed a year earlier is set in the starkest of political contexts. The Search for Sana blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction as it explores the nature of true friendship and the inception of an unthinkable crime. (ISBN: 9781845290788). Good.