A Heaven of Others

Fiction, illustrated by Michael Hafftka. This brilliant novel, by one of the leading young voices in contemporary fiction, is best described by the poem with which it begins: Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy, Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, and his Post-Mortem Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven: as Said to Me and Said through Me by an Angel of the One True God Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream. When a ten year-old Jewish boy is exploded on a Jerusalem street by a ten year-old Palestinian boy, he wakes up in a heaven no one in his tradition prepared him for, a heaven of others. Cohen's novel stands at the crossroads of a conflicted city, and word-play that both celebrates and dismantles tradition.