This delightful collection of stories reflects aspects of life as experienced in Jerusalem and Beirut over the past 60 years. From tales of surreptitious teenage romances in Jerusalem, to day-long curfews during the Lebanese civil war and a renegade rooster in Beirut, the stories tell the tale of people getting on with their normal lives against the odds - occasionally losing, but often succeeding.

Nabil, a Lebanese surgeon training at the Mass. General Hospital, had been for a brief visit to south Lebanon where his family lived, about ten months after the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon in July 2006. His family had survived the war, but he had not seen them for three years. On his return to Boston, he is denied admission to the US by the officer interrogating him. The officer decided he was a security risk, and put him back on the next plane out of Logan airport. This fateful decision devastated Nabil, thinking of his beloved Helen, a senator's daughter, who had agreed to marry him. In his mental anguish, the only thing that kept turning over in his mind was that prophetic poem by Mathew Arnold he had recited to Helen one day by the Charles river: "Ah, love, let us be true To one another For the world which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night."