Apeirogon by Colum McCann

This is a brilliant book that takes an impossibly complicated situation, the Israeli-Palestinian war/conflict. His two main characters are taken from the headlines. They are two figures from real life, Rami Elhanan, an Israeli graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian scholar and onetime political prisoner. Each of the men has lost a daughter — in Rami’s case, Smadar, the victim of suicide bombers, in Bassam’s, Abir, killed by a rubber bullet fired from the back of an Israeli jeep by an 18-year-old. Improbably, the fathers become close friends, supporting each other’s protests and speaking across the world. The book captures aspects of the impossibility of a solution that does not involve both sides wanting it to work, and the two tier society that the Israelis have built, where every citizen is a soldier and every soldier has the authority over the borders and denigates the Palestineans that cross it. The dye is caste, so to speak. Yet this description doesn’t capture the experience of reading “Apeirogon”, which is defined as an object with an infinite number of sides. Its short, digestible sections are about everything and nothing, the vast and the narrow aspects of building a nation with these pieces that don't fit together. Maybe an Irishman, a citizen of another divided nation, is the ideal person to show us how hard this will be to fix.