Ocean State Libraries

At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England's green and pleasant land, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes' enigmatic brother, Mycroft.
"Gentlemen, we are at your service." Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for...

A panoramic and provocative history of life in Palestine during the three strife-torn but romantic decades when Britain ruled, and the seeds of today's conflicts were sown. Tom Segev explores the dramatic period before the creation of the state, when Britain ruled over "one Palestine, complete" (as noted in the receipt signed by the High Commissioner) and when its promise to both Jews and Arabs that they would inherit the land set in motion the conflict...

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and change when all things seem possible.
Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and disparate...

In the 1920s, Hajj Amin-al-Husseini was the political and spiritual leader of the Palestinian Arabs. A vicious anti-Semite, he led numerous pogroms against Jewish settlers. During World War II, al-Husseini allied himself and his people with Hitler; he lived in Germany, met with Hitler, encouraged "the final solution," and became close friends with Himmler and other Nazis. After the war, al-Husseini escaped (he would certainly have been convicted at...

From one of the world's most revered historians, the first major history of contemporary Jerusalem.

"A gripping historical novel of sex, love, and justice in the tinderbox of British Mandate Palestine, by the acclaimed author of A Palestine Affair In 1933, Ivor Castle, an Oxford-educated Jew, arrives in Palestine to take up a position as assistant to the defense counsel for the two men accused of murdering Haim Arlosoroff, a figure whose tactics to get Jews out of Hitler's Germany and into Palestine were controversial enough to get him killed. Ivor,...