*Starred Review* Disgruntled Israeli neurosurgeon Eitan Green is out for a joyride on the desert, under the full moon, when he hits and kills an Eritrean illegal immigrant. He flees the scene and returns home to his police-detective wife and two young sons, but the next day, the dead man's wife shows up with his wallet, which he had dropped at the scene. She has an unusual demand: she will keep quiet if he meets her that night to treat a patient in an abandoned garage behind the café where she works. But, as it turns out, it isn't just one night and one patient. It's night after night, and patient after patient. When Eitan mires himself in lies, to his family and coworkers, the situation grows more tense. As characters reveal previously hidden facets, Gundar-Goshen's mesmerizing novel, her first to be published in English, moves continually into unexpected territory. Smoothly alternating points of view, it uses the format of a thriller to study the almost unbridgeable gap between insider and outsider. The complex relationships between Israelis, Bedouin Arabs, and Eritreans may be unique to Israel, but that social dynamic will reverberate meaningfully with U.S. readers as well.--Quamme, Margaret Copyright 2017 Booklist

EITAN GREEN, the protagonist of the Israeli author Ayelet Gundar-Goshen's novel "Waking Lions," is a respected neurosurgeon who has been forced by a professional dispute to relocate from Tel Aviv to Beersheba, a desert town where dust is everywhere, "a thin white layer, like the icing on a birthday cake no one wants." Speeding through a remote area in his S.U.V. late one night, he hits an Eritrean man walking by the roadside. And when he decides that the victim is beyond help, he impulsively flees the scene. The next morning, the victim's widow shows up at Eitan's doorstep, holding his wallet and demanding not his money but his expertise. Soon she has blackmailed him into treating illegal immigrants from the northeast of Africa at an abandoned garage that has been turned into an underground hospital. The novel that follows - part psychological thriller, part morality play - takes readers through the wilderness of the Negev desert and its underworld of Israeli drug dealers, Bedouin gangs and desperate refugees. Gundar-Goshen has said that she believes the writer's job is to force readers to look at what they'd usually avoid. Not short on discomfiting scenes, "Waking Lions" offers a commentary on privilege and otherness, challenging readers to confront their own blind spots and preconceptions. The themes of visibility and invisibility, of the power dynamics between the observed and the observer, run throughout the narrative. Although the victim's widow, Sirkit, who scrubs floors at a gas station restaurant, often goes unnoticed by Israelis, she is a beautiful woman, and thus used to the male gaze. She knows that "men can fasten their eyes on you the way people put a collar on a dog." As the lone witness to Eitan's crime, she has become "the only one who knew him for what he was." The authority she holds over him both infuriates and intrigues him. The intimacy that emerges between them is rendered with a restrained intensity that creates some of the novel's most dramatic scenes. In an ironic twist, Eitan's wife, Liat, is among the detectives investigating the hit-and-run accident. Brilliant at her job, she has an uncanny ability to see through people, yet she finds her own husband increasingly unknowable. Mercilessly scrutinizing him as he sleeps, pushing aside her customary tenderness, she finds the moment "so cruel, so horrifying" that she must look away. Trained as a clinical psychologist, Gundar-Goshen examines her characters with the same formidable gaze. Nobody emerges unscathed. Not the arrogant doctor, who displays little compassion for his patients and whose guilt, "like a flower that blooms only for one day," withers in the face of Sirkit's "blazing extortion." Not Liat, who struggles to find her place in a misogynist police force, yet admits to her own prejudice against Arabs. And not Sirkit, whose moral flaws and failures in judgment are divulged as the story unfolds, allowing her to evolve from a saintly victim into a complex heroine. Gundar-Goshen is adept at instilling emotional depth into a thriller plot, delivering the required twists and turns along with an incisive portrayal of her characters' guilt, shame and desire, fluidly shifting between their perspectives. Although the tension slackens midway through as the narrative becomes burdened with elaborate back stories and lengthy musings, readers will be rewarded by its exhilarating, cinematic finale. Skillfully translated by Sondra Silverston, "Waking Lions" is a sophisticated and darkly ambitious novel, revealing an aspect of Israeli life rarely seen in its literature. ? AYELET TSABARI'S story collection, "The Best Place on Earth," won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2015.

A moment's inattention upends multiple lives in Gundar-Goshen's powerful thriller, the Israeli author's first novel to be published in the U.S. When Dr. Eitan Green uncovered corruption at the hospital he worked at in Tel Aviv, he was forced to take a less desirable position in Beersheba in the Negev desert. Now, after a too-long shift at Beersheba's Soroka Hospital, an exhausted Eitan glances at the Moon in his rearview window during his drive home. While his eyes are off the road, he strikes an Eritrean man, who suffers a skull fracture. Unable to do anything to save the man's life, the guilt-ridden Eitan flees. His nightmare worsens when the victim's wife appears at his home, bearing the wallet he dropped at the scene of the hit-and-run. He agrees to give her fellow Eritreans medical treatment at night in exchange for her keeping silent about his role in her husband's death. The arrangement forces Eitan to lie to his police detective wife, who has been looking into the fatality. The psychological complications match the plot ones and will please Ruth Rendell fans. Agent: Grainne Fox, Fletcher & Company. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Winner of the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize for 2017, this combination of psychological thriller, crime novel, and morality play revolves around Dr. Eitan Green, a respected neurosurgeon who has been exiled to the remote southern town of Beersheva. After working a long shift, he takes his SUV off-roading in the desert and accidentally hits and kills an Eritrean refugee. Eitan flees the scene, but the victim's wife discovers his wallet and blackmails him into establishing an underground clinic to treat undocumented immigrants from Africa. NBC bought the rights to adapt the novel into a TV series but will change the setting to Beverly Hills, CA. Gundar-Goshen's debut novel, One Night, Markovitch, which won Israel's prestigious Sapir Prize for debut fiction in 2012, was translated into English by Sondra Silverston but so far has only been published in the UK. (Xpress Reviews, 2/10/17) © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.