If you are baffled by the conflict in the Middle East, try reading this poignant love story, an exploration of what it meant to be a Jew as Palestine was created, and of what happens when the past is forgotten.

Evelyn Sert, a young hairdresser from Soho on the verge of adulthood, arrives in the white Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv in 1946, where Jewish refugees and idealists from all over Europe are gathering to forge not only the new Jew but a modern way of thinking. For Evelyn, adept at disguises, it is a time when anything seems possible, even for a woman. But like the fate of the modernist architecture of the city, these dreams will turn out to be not quite what the settlers had imagined.