Dr Eitan Green is an ambitious neurosurgeon who finds himself, against his wishes, exiled from Tel Aviv to Beersheba. Dusty and provincial, it’s a city he despises – though not, perhaps, as much as he despises himself for ending up there (having threatened to blow the whistle on a hospital scandal, he contrived to convince himself that he’d rather accept a job in the Negev than the fallout of his moral crusade). His only compensation – and even he thinks this is paltry, ridiculous – is a new SUV, a vehicle he’d planned to drive, fast, out in the desert, but which mostly just sits there, taunting him like everything else in this god-awful place.
One night, returning after a shift to his gleaming white house and sleeping wife, Liat, he detours into the desert and puts his foot down. The moon is wonderfully bright, and this is what he’s thinking about when he hits the Eritrean. Thunk. What should he do? Though his internal organs are suddenly “sheathed in ice”, when he asks himself the question, the answer comes back: nothing. The man is beyond help. No one saw him. And so he goes home. The next morning, however, just as he’s thinking (hoping) the whole thing was a bad dream, there is a knock at the door. Outside is an Eritrean woman. In her hand is his wallet.
This is how Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen (translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston) begins: with such velocity that you can’t put it down. A moral thriller, first, and then a procedural one (Liat is a police officer), I commend it to you, now it’s in paperback, as the great overlooked read of the summer.
Racism, hatred, the male ego: Gundar-Goshen knows how these things work, in Israel, and the world; self-loathing and fear, her novel suggests, are often the same thing. But its real engine, one that never stops thrumming, is the idea that life can change for ever in one nauseating second – and here Eitan Green joins that very select group of traffic accident antiheroes whose other members include (what cool company) Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s endlessly enjoyable The Bonfire of the Vanities and Delaney Mossbacher in TC Boyle’s brilliant The Tortilla Curtain.
Waking Lions is published by Pushkin Press (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £7.37
