This remarkable, kaleidoscopic novel tells the fragmented stories of a group of women and men brought together by chance in a small neighborhood in the hills of Israel. It is 1995, and Amir, a young man studying psychology in Jerusalem, and his girlfriend Noa, studying photography in Tel Aviv, decide to move in together, choosing a tiny apartment midway between their two cities -- a village that was forcibly emptied of its Arab inhabitants in 1948. Although the two students are only looking for a convenient place to spend time together, they find their new home to be no less complex a web of relationships than urban life: their landlords live on the other side of a paper-thin wall; the next-door neighbors have just lost their eldest son in Lebanon; and further down the street, a Palestinian construction worker named Saddiq is keeping a close watch on the house where his own family used to live.