Random Things Tours: Dirt by Sarah Sultoon

 

It is my pleasure and my honour to be on my first book tour of the year with a title from one of my favorite publishers around: Orenda Books. Last year, I had the chance of being included in several special booktours with them, organised by Anne Cater whose Random Things Tours always support the books that you should definitely read. 

Among many awesome books and authors, I had the chance to discover Sarah Sultoon, a former international journalist for CNN whose book, The Shot is an unputdownable geopolitical thriller. Sarah Sultoon is now back with her third book, Dirt set in a kibbutz in Northern Israel.

Kibbutzim are an unique successful socialist experiment - maybe the only socialist experiment ever to succeed - where education, finances and daily tasks are co-shared. Many things changed since Degania Alef, the first kibbutz war ever founded in 1910, and meanwhile many were lately ´privatised´, but for those who had the chance to be born and grow up there, there is a completely different mentality and mindset that was acquired. 

And, as the action taking place in Dirt will show, there is more to a kibbutz than the socialist enthusiasm of sharing the daily agricultural tasks. Another geopolitical element that weights on the overall ambiance of the book is the fact that it is set in Norther Israel, close to the volatile border with Lebanon, from where the terrorist Hezbollah is regularly attacking. But borders and their closeness create also a different type of mentality and not only due to the closeness to conflict. From the both sides, the conflict and people outside or victims of it, may look and feel different and this feeling may be sizeable sometimes during the reading of Dirt.

Another fact about kibbutzim is that it also attracted many international - particularly among youth - participant who took the challenge of spending more or less time here as a different ´life lesson´, learning from the exposure to a more ´alternative´ lifestyle. For people living there was far from being a distraction, but international students from Germany, Australia or UK experienced the kibbutz life as an encounter with physical work and everyday real struggles for survival. Lola, one of the main characters in Dirt found her an escape from her broken family. A distraction, a longing for a different, better world? It is hard to see what was really important, and the enfolding events do not leave too much time for thinking. 

As an Israeli Arab is found dead in the dirt of the chicken cop, the action moves slowly to the investigation itself which prompts international atttention via Johny, an journalist based miles away from the kibbutz, in Jerusalem, where he writes for International Tribune. Together with Lola, Johny will be the second important voice of the story, and the alternance between the two gives a complementary echo to the events taking place. The switch between the two points of view, as shared by two different personalities with different motivations and personal histories, is an important element in developing the story.

I´ve found myself very much captivated by the story, due to the topic itself, but also for the story. Setting a thriller story in the Middle East, particularly Israel, is a tremendous challenges, especially for non-Israeli writers, and the pure literary comparison added for me another layer of interest for this book.

Dirt by Sarah Sultoon is an invitation to a different reading of thrillers set in the Middle East and although there are situations when the action takes precedence over the character development and particularities, it is nevertheless a real feast for anyone who loves to keep an eye and a heart in this part of the world, be it only through the world of fiction.

Rating: 4 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own