This heart-warming, charming and clever first novel dips into the lives of each of the inhabitants of a village in Israel.
It is 1995 and Noa and Amir, a student couple, have decided to move in together. Noa is studying photography in Jerusalem and Amir is a psychology student in Tel Aviv. They choose a small apartment in a village in the hills, midway between the two cities.
Originally called El-Kastel, the village was emptied of its Arab inhabitants in 1948 and is now the home of Jewish immigrants from Kurdistan. Not far from the apartment lives a family grieving for their eldest son who was killed in Lebanon. The younger brother left behind, Yotam, forgotten by his parents, turns to Amir for support.
Further down the street, Saddiq watches the house while he works at a building site. He knows that this house is the one from which his family was driven by the Jews when he was a boy, and to which his mother still has a rusty key. Despite friendships that develop and lives that become entwined, tensions among this melting pot of characters seem to be rising to the surface.
This enchanting and irresistible novel offers us windows into the characters' lives. Each comes from somewhere different but we gradually see that there's much about them that's the same. Homesick is a beautiful and moving story about history, love, family and the true meaning of home.

Dori's father has gone travelling in South America and, suffering from some kind of breakdown, following the death of his wife, he goes missing. Dori sets out to find him, leaving his wife and young son at home in Israel. Inbar is escaping from her life - from the grief that she can't shake after her brother's death, from the boyfriend she doesn't love - and impulsively sets out for South America. While she's there she meets a man who is searching for his father... In his most ambitious novel to date, Eshkol Nevo weaves a beautiful love story with two tales: the story of the wandering Jews who came to their Promised Land in the wake of the Second World War, embodied by Inbar's grandmother Lily's narrative of her sea journey over from Poland, and the story of a new generation of wandering Israelis who leave again to go backpacking, perhaps hoping that the distance will allow them to see their homeland more clearly. Neuland is a romantic adventure, a search for a father that leads to love, and a quest for an understanding of identity and for second chances. Is it ever possible to start again? Nevo has produced a daring, epic novel that asks profound questions, but the truth and warmth of his writing make it all-consuming and irresistibly loveable.

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.