Horowitch is absolutely right that attention spans have shortened and the average person is less likely to pick up a book (or read a 7,000 word article) in comparison to past decades, given all the new and shiny distractions offered by technology.

But to call it “the end of reading” is misleading.

Not all books are dense, classic literature like the examples given in her article. I consider myself an avid, voracious reader from a young age and I have never had the patience or interest to read Shakespeare or other classics. It’s not my taste. Give me a historical fiction novel and I will devour it. It is long form prose that requires attention over hours, days (and even weeks). To take the following passage and draw from that the conclusion that young people these days are ushering in “the end of reading” is a long bow to draw:

In a study of English and English-education majors at two regional universities in Kansas, published in 2024, researchers asked students to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House. The novel follows members of the Jarndyce family through a lengthy legal dispute over their inheritance. It begins:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage.

“So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London. Dickens continues by describing the Lord Chancellor as he is “addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief.” Another student interpreted this passage as “describing him in a room with an animal I think? Great whiskers? A cat?”

If Dickens went to pitch this manuscript to an agent today, he wouldn’t even receive an email back. Not because Dickens isn’t brilliant, but because literature and our taste for it has changed. It does not mean that reading is over.

Storytelling is a bedrock of the human experience.

Reading has changed, and it will continue to change.

Our taste for it will evolve and, in many ways, reflect the broader changes to our world and society. I know countless people who became readers for the first time in their lives during pandemic lockdowns. The ability to dive into a page and enter another world built by our imagination will always have a place.

So please, if Rose Horowitch thinks reading = Dickens, can someone please guide her to a Kristin Hannah novel or a copy of The Spoon and the Sea?

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I am in 7-8.

For the most part, it’s readers saying one of the following:

• I just finished Book X, loved it, what should I read next?

• I am in a reading slump, looking for a book that is X, Y or Z, what should I try?

• I am part way through Book X, does it get better? Should I continue?

As I write this, the most highly-discussed book club books are The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett (lots of recs for the audiobook), The Correspondent by Victoria Evans and Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. In the Historical Fiction groups, it’s all about The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah and The Alice Network by Kate Quinn.

The biggest mistake an author can make is to recommend their own book.

Book recommendations are a trust-based system, rooted in social exchange theory. While your book may indeed be exactly what they’re looking for, this is not where readers go to hear authors peddle their book. The self promotion grind is hard but this isn’t the place for it even if you’re being honest and upfront about the fact that you’re the author. It’s not that it’s wrong, it just psychologically will not work in your favor at scale.

Until The Spoon and the Sea takes off in these groups one day, I try to be like Ed Sheeran. He goes to busk with the people because he loves the craft. Above all else, he is a musician who loves music.

Writers, above all else, be readers. Join these groups to follow the zeitgeist and, most importantly, to recommend books you actually loved to read and help put them in the hands of people looking for it. Books and reading are a powerful form of goodwill that will come back, one day, in some way.

Want to show that you’re an author? First show that you’re a reader.

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I know this firsthand. After October 7 my literary agency shared constant anti-Israel vitriol on social media and began to describe me as an Australian author who had “relocated to Tel Aviv to work in tech.”

Literary agents make their living on commission. If they genuinely cannot sell a manuscript to publishers, there is a commercial reality underneath the cultural one. That doesn’t excuse the climate that should be named and prosecuted. But understanding the commercial mechanism helps us route around it, and routing around it is the most useful thing we can do right now.

Which is the question I’m more interested in.

The investigation into antisemitism in publishing should absolutely continue. But I hope it runs in parallel with learning to map the alternate routes. Because there are real ones, and they are opening faster than most people realize.

Israel itself is the proof of concept that this is far from some sort of consolation prize. No natural resources, unfriendly neighbors, and yet the forced necessity of innovation produced an economic powerhouse. Jewish publishing is at the same inflection point and can yield the same results if we work hard and smart.

One piece of the puzzle is parallel publishing infrastructure e.g. new boutique Jewish publishing houses being founded specifically to platform Jewish stories the traditional industry is deprioritizing. Jewish literary newsletters, book clubs, and reading communities are growing.

Technological tailwinds have blown apart the gatekeeping layer between author and reader e.g. self-publishing tools, AI-assisted marketing, word-of-mouth amplification through social and community channels.

We are people of the book. A book-buying people. The market for Jewish stories is not the problem. The distribution infrastructure was the problem, and that infrastructure is under construction.

I recently spoke about this with The Australian Jewish News. The lemons are real. The people responsible for them should be held to account. And while that fight continues, we can also make lemonade that might be better than anything the original orchard was ever going to give us.

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I am convinced they got married there because Taylor Swift is nothing if not an all-star world builder.

From the crumbs of information we have, the interior looked like a basketball game had never been played there. Taylor and her team turned MSG into a once-in-an-era immersive, magical world.

I’ve always admired Taylor Swift for her concerts, engineering total immersion where thousands of strangers feel light for three and a half hours, trading friendship bracelets. World-building, done right, isn’t about fooling anyone. It’s about creating something so complete that people forget to look for the seams. It’s a talent for building trust and authors should be taking note.

Fiction authors, we should be taking notes.

It’s not how much detail you pile into the world you’re writing. It’s about the harmony between the details and the story it tells. One thing forced or out of place and your reader remembers they’re just reading a book.

Two books come to mind as ‘what good world-building looks like’.

1. Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. This is perhaps the most building world-building I have ever read. That North Carolina marsh was practically a character.

2. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah. I could almost taste the sand in my mouth.

I am writing my second novel now and I can almost imagine closing myself into a Madison Square Garden dome and thinking: how would I decorate this scene so that the guests, my readers, feel like the one thousand guests at MSG immersed in the* peach and white / garden / countryside / castle of Taylor Swift

*speculative as this is written before we have any photographs.

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These two episodes are a dramatization of real events from October 7. If someone had written that plot in seasons 1 through 4, viewers would have thought the writers lost the plot. It’s extreme, apocalyptic and completely unbelievable.

And yet it happened. It’s our real story which is exactly what made it so painful to watch.

It reminded me of two books.

Jodi Picoult’s Wish You Were Here. If someone had written a novel before 2020 about a worldwide pandemic that grounded every plane, shuttered every city, and killed people at that scale, it would have seemed far-fetched. And then it was real, and suddenly the premise wasn’t fantasy or even pure fiction.

After the pandemic, I also read Nikki Ehrlich’s The Measure. The fictional premise is that everyone over 23 wakes up one morning to find a small box on their doorstep. Inside is an indestructible string, its length determined by how much life they have left. The questions that flow from that range from, ‘what do you do if you know how much time you have?’ to ‘what if your string and your partner’s are different lengths?’. It raises societal questions, ‘would you discriminate against a job candidate or a political candidate whose string was short?’ and ethical questions, ‘would a doctor bother saving you if they already knew your length?’

Having lived through something that would have seemed stranger than fiction before it happened, my mind opened up, less sure about the line between the plausible and the impossible, allowing me to enjoy the book tremendously.

We used to say “stranger than fiction” for a fun or quirky observation or a mildly amusing plot twist in real life.

It doesn’t feel like that anymore.

As my head and heart still hurt from Fauda, I think about how I felt and how my mind opened up reading Wish You Were Here and The Measure the common thread seems to be that it asks you to follow the questions, knowing just how crazy the world can be: What if this happened? What would you do?

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While I would only use a proper human voice for a full audiobook (see my post about the Uncanny Valley), here are 3 things I learned about AI for audio:

1. It’s easier than you think, and the top solutions have a free version. Upload your text, pick a voice, and you have a sample almost immediately. I used an AI voiceover for my book promo on Canva, which auto-generates subtitles too (this is fine for short projects like a promo video). The hardest part is picking the right voice (gender, accent, age, tone). There are a lot of them, and it takes a few tries. But once you find one that fits, it moves fast.

2. It will butcher anything that isn’t an English word. For example, my book has a smattering of Yiddish words. Remember that AI narration reads what’s on the page, and if what’s on the page is “chutzpah” or “Shabbat”, it will do its best and its best will not be good. The fix is simple-ish. Before you upload, go through your manuscript and rewrite the tricky words phonetically in a separate script version e.g. “chutzpah” as “HOOTS-pah”, “Shabbat” as “sha-BAT.” The AI reads your script, not the word, so you’re just telling it what to hear. Some companies have a pronunciation dictionary feature if you have a lot of them and want a more permanent solution. It’s fiddly but fixable, don’t let it put you off.

3. Go for a quick win. Using AI for your whole book may seem daunting. There are smaller quick wins that AI can give e.g. a first chapter sample. It’s a great way for loyal readers and/or new audiences to get a taste of your book. A 10-minute audio sample does what a cover and a blurb can’t, it puts a reader inside the book. Put that perfect opening chapter you wrote as a hook for agents or publishers to good use.

And one bonus thought on AI narration more broadly: don’t think about it only in terms of speed and efficiency. Think about personalization which is a true unlock of AI. Some readers might prefer a woman’s voice, others want a British accent, and some might want both or neither. You don’t have to do the whole book to test this. A first chapter in two or three different voices costs almost nothing and can be a great way to engage readers.

If you’ve read this far, I popped my Canva AI-narrated promo video on Instagram and got approached by a publisher, leading to an offer.

Magic can happen, good luck!

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I get it but it doesn’t work, and there’s a better way.

(Quick caveat - I am pulling suggestions from my day job, Director of Marketing - Brand and Communications at a large AI tech company)

In the enterprise world, when a large company is assessing a new tool or capability like AI, they have three options: build it themselves, buy it, or partner with a vendor. The same build-buy-partner framework applies to marketing your book and none of it requires asking anyone to buy anything.

Build - Everything you know about your book that a reader doesn’t. Where the idea came from, the obstacle that almost stopped you finishing it, the character you had to kill off etc. These are gold and they make people want to read your book far more than being told or asked to buy it, even when it’s tongue in cheek. Books are a relational product, not a transactional one. So build content that pulls people toward the book the same way you wrote a story that brings people in.

Buy - full disclosure, I had the build and partner bits figured out before I wrote this but the buy section I brainstormed with AI. It helped me narrow down that I am not talking about buying with money, but with time and in ways that nobody can stop you from doing i.e. you don’t need to be invited or accepted to a podcast or a panel or a column spot, for example. Communities of your readers already exist and are open to anyone e.g. Facebook groups for historical fiction lovers. So buy eyeballs with your time and effort. Show up with recommendations (not your own book!!!), be genuinely useful, talk about books you love. Be a reader first.

Partner - Books aren’t competitive, rising tides raise all ships. If someone loves one book it doesn’t stop them buying yours. Readers who love one book in a genre are the most likely people to buy another. So find authors writing for a similar readership and propose something mutual e.g. a joint Zoom call or a shared newsletter feature. Worst case they don’t reply but unless you’re JK Rowling, you can benefit from someone else’s platform and they can benefit from yours. Most authors are looking for exactly the same thing.

The authors who sell the most books aren’t the ones posting “buy my book” the most. Build, buy, partner, and go for it. (Feel free to reach out to me, for example!)

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A lot of people know that The Spoon and the Sea is based on a combination of a real story from my family, and my Grandma. The answer to this question is: no. All of the character names are changed and not just for privacy reasons.

I had a lot of fun choosing them and I think Jewish character names are an opportunity loaded with meaning and clues for the reader. The process felt second only to naming my four children.

Here’s why.

My favourite book of all time, Exodus by Leon Uris, gave us Ari Ben Canaan. Literally, lion, son of Canaan. You know exactly who this man is before he opens his mouth i.e. proudly, openly Jewish, strong, loves his country. It’s also extremely on the nose (which reminds us how much has changed since 1958 especially post October 7).

writes about the cost of this disappearing act in People Love Dead Jews, the idea that Jewish identity has always been more palatable for everyone when it’s a little less visible. Jewish names in real life and in books are part of the package.

What contemporary Jewish fiction writers are doing now is something more subtle. But if you know what you’re looking for, it can be fun to peel back the layers of meaning to find the storyline clues.

Character arcs / conflict - Every story needs a conflict and the protagonist’s name is the perfect vehicle to allude to what it may be. In Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, Danny Saunders is a Hasidic boy with a Harvard-bound mind, trapped between his father’s world and the secular one pulling at him. The name Danny as a warm, American, and unthreatening diminutive of the biblical name Daniel wraps up this internal battle. The name does the work of showing you his dilemma before Potok has to explain it.

In The Spoon and the Sea, the protagonist is half-Jewish and half-Arab without truly fitting into either world. Ashi is the ambiguous, pronounceable nickname for Ashar in its Arabic form and Asher in Hebrew. Zooming in even more, the name means happiness. The book follows a son trying to excavate his mother’s story and piece together his own history before it gets swallowed up by dementia. Reaching into those last painful memories is the last-ditch chance at wholeness and, ultimately, happiness.

Surnames - Jewish surnames are a world of their own with clues to a life. Schneider means tailor. Shapiro points to the area of Germany where the family is from. Haddad, like the protagonist in ’s Songs for the Brokenhearted, means blacksmith.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Rose is from a traditional Ashkenazi family living in Golders Green in the 1940s. Her surname is Weiss to help introduce the heritage she is loaded with when she comes into the story. Quintessentially Ashkenazi and meaning ‘white’, the surname Weiss nods to the weight of her surprising romance with a black man from Zanzibar and the layers of tension in an interracial relationship in that time and place.

Israeli fiction and nature-themed names - Names drawn from the natural world are rarely just names. In Israeli fiction this runs especially deep, because Hebrew names drawn from flowers, trees, animals, and seasons are not unusual or poetic choices. They are completely ordinary Israeli names. Think of recent Eurovision superstars like Netta (a sapling), Yuval (a stream) and Eden, like the Garden. What this means for the reader is that an Israeli character’s name is often a piece of the landscape they belong to.

In The Spoon and the Sea, Calanit is named for the wild red anemone that blooms every winter across the Israeli south. It also alludes to the Hebrew word for bride (kallah) and sets up a visual cue for one of the most painful scenes in the book. She is the woman the protagonist wants to marry. She breaks his heart and every time he sees those flowers covering the hillsides, he cannot escape the thought of her.

So next time you pick up a Jewish novel, spend a moment with the names as they pop into the story. Look up what the name means in Hebrew, Arabic, or Yiddish. Notice whether a surname is Ashkenazi or Mizrahi. Jewish names, in fiction and in life, have always carried maps of where a family came from and clues about their life.

What Jewish authors do with character names is what Jewish naming does for people, it folds a whole story into a single word.

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This is what it’s like to swim in lands of AI-generated writing e.g. LinkedIn.

Working in tech for a large AI company, LinkedIn is a big part of my job (where my sub-job is telling people to stop outsourcing their brain to AI for LinkedIn posts). It has become almost unreadable, because people who aren’t writers don’t seem to notice that everyone can tell when they asked ChatGPT “write me a linkedin post about blah blah AI trend”. Even if they remove the em-dashes and the “it’s not X it’s Y” sentences, it’s just off.

The State of Brand shared a brilliant essay on what they call The Great Flattening. The bottom line is that companies all use the same model, trained on the statistical average of everything ever written, which produces the statistical average right back at them. So everything that comes out of an AI model sounds exactly that - flat, like the average of everyone else’s voice.

Many authors blanche at the mention of AI. We’ve spent years building this muscle and we have been made to think that we are watching it dissolve and that even the mere mention of AI is unethical.

I think we need to learn how to have this conversation. The Uncanny Valley is very real. When readers want to curl up with a book, they want to enjoy it (not feel threatened or weirded out by it).

At work I need to scold people for writing on LinkedIn using AI. Luckily, Substack is filled with authors who don’t need to be told.

So the question doesn’t need to erupt and cause panic.

There are ways authors can use AI, not for writing:

Research. AI is a brilliant starting point and good at summarizing what’s known. But it hallucinates without proper prompting or a critical human eye so use it to cover ground quickly and then go cover some of it yourself.

Brainstorming. Let’s say you have a plot hole to fill, work with AI to throw ten resolutions at you. You’ll probably hate nine (or ten) of them. One of them might give you an idea and then go from there.

Marketing. Use it for visual and audio work (read my post on this). Work with AI to scour for book clubs that have picked books like yours, finding relevant communities etc. My email voice is second nature thanks to my tech job, but for some authors email outreach is less a comfort zone and AI can be helpful to at least get started.

Bottom line, AI is a problem for everyone who now thinks they can write.

For us, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

Write the words of the book yourself and use AI for everything else.

This is a new section with AI x book marketing tidbits from my own experience. Subscribe to follow the conversation as I try to demystify the subject on everyone's mind.

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Have we seen this movie before?

Authorship has always evolved. Once it was revolutionary to revise your work. Then to research from books instead of the field. Then to Google instead of libraries. We didn’t stop being writers when we switched from ink to keyboards, or through any of the shifts along the way. AI is just the next frontier, maybe the biggest one in our lifetime, but it’s part of a long continuum, not a break from it.

How does AI fit into a collaborative creative process?

Sometimes I sit down knowing the emotional point of a scene, and that I want to start with a flashback. Don’t know what the flashback is yet though. I use AI to brainstorm. It’s like a lightning-fast, very eager intern who doesn’t mind being rejected. But deciding to start with a flashback, then linking it to a tiny visual detail from the chapter before, that’s still magic from little old humans.

What happens to voice when AI starts suggesting the next sentence?

AI still struggles with voice. Hands you something correct but hollow, a lot of the time. Brilliant for breaking a blank page but making a reader actually feel something? Not quite yet. Yet being the operative word, because the pace of innovation is mind-blowing and emotive storytelling may not be out of reach for long.

What’s an idea worth when AI can generate thousands?

We live in an era of infinite ideas. But I come from Israeli startup culture, where ideas are cheap because everyone has one, including your taxi driver. What matters isn’t the idea, it’s what you do with it. As The Social Network puts it, if you were the inventor of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook. JK Rowling wasn’t the only one with a story about a boy wizard. She wrote it first, wrote it well, and put it out there. Sorry if that sounds brutal.

When it comes to research, where does speed cut depth?

Fast research feels like having a tireless assistant riding the high of an all-nighter and a million Red Bulls. Want a legal case summarized in seconds? No problem. But the danger isn’t shallow research on the subject matter. It’s a shallow connection for the writer. When shortcuts get too easy we risk skipping the long winding paths that build emotional investment. That’s the part the reader actually feels, even if they only see the tip of the iceberg. Depth isn’t just in the facts you gather, it’s in how much you care while gathering them. Read my piece about Jodi Picoult that touches this subject.

How can AI help busy people find time to write?

Probably the most personal reason I’ve come to value AI. I’m a mother of 4 under 7, full-time job as a tech exec. I hate not finishing things I start. Writing, in that context, can feel like a project that haunts me at night. AI helps me move faster and fire on some cylinders when I need momentum. It doesn’t write for me, but it helps me start and keep moving, because it increases my chance of finishing. Plays at odds with point 5 sometimes, but I think it’s a balance worth pursuing.

This is a new section with AI x book marketing tidbits from my own experience. Subscribe to follow the conversation as I try to demystify the subject on everyone's mind.

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With authors outsourcing research to a chatbot these days, Jodi Picoult is still standing in a bakery to see how bread actually rises before she’ll let a character knead a single loaf on the page.

AI can synthesize everything ever written about beekeeping but it cannot stand in an apiary or get stung. It cannot taste bread that was baked before the dough went from the fridge to room temperature. That gap is exactly why Jodi Picoult’s books will feel alive when almost-but-not-quite-actually-good AI-assisted fiction starts to run rampant, and it’s the reminder every author needs to stick with the elbow grease of real research.

I just finished Mad Honey (went to the top of the TBR pile as I am co-authoring my second novel and I wanted to learn from the best how it’s done) and it reminded me why I keep coming back to her:

1. The OG of multiple timelines and POV. I had her in the back of my mind constantly when switching from post WW2 London to 1950s Zanzibar and present-day Jerusalem. And if anyone can make me fall in love with an African American nurse at the same time that I go into the mind of a white supremacist, it’s Jodi Picoult (Small Great Things).

2. Plot twists. She still surprises me, even after I’ve read almost everything she’s written. While I did pick the killer in Mad Honey, I did not see the main twist coming even with all I knew about the authors (will not say more to avoid spoilers). Most authors with 25-plus books develop a formula you can spot a mile off.

3. Learning new tricks. Yes, Picoult has some conventions that repeat across her body of work (moral dilemma, multiple perspectives, court case often defended by Jordan McAfee) but I appreciate that she keeps challenging herself. Co-authoring (double the work, not half of it), writing timelines backwards etc. Despite finding the thing that works and sells, she keeps making things harder for herself.

4. Great metaphors and similes, which is harder than it sounds. It’s so easy to get these wrong, sound contrived or forced and overwritten. In Mad Honey, there was a heart fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird, a child clinging like a barnacle, the flesh of a plum splitting through its skin, something uncontained. I read lines like that and think, yes, now I feel it even more.

I wrote The Spoon and the Sea thinking about how Jodi Picoult structures her timelines and perspectives as they chop and change. It’s one of the pieces of feedback that means the most, because it’s easy to lose the reader from the grip of the story when you ask them to travel across the world in space and time.

So this is my thank you to an author who still gets her hands dirty and geeks out on cool facts about random things before spinning it into a story.

My favourites: The Pact, Small Great Things, Nineteen Minutes

When my Grandma passed away I missed her in a way I didn’t really have language for. I’d walk into stores and buy something just to have a reason to tell the salesperson a story about her. Someone wise told me grief is love with nowhere to go. That stuck with me more than anything else anyone said that year (like “at least she lived a long life” or “she’s still with you”. True. Thanks. But I miss her).

So I started writing whenever I was said, usually in the mornings when I used to Skype with her (yes, the old-age home had Skype not Facetime).

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about writing through grief. It’s genuinely therapeutic, but at some point you have to pull it back. I wrote every last breath my Grandma took. All of it and every detail of those ten days in the dementia ward. It helped me to write it but a lot of that didn’t make it into the book in the end. There’s a real difference between what helps you process something and what a reader actually wants or needs.

My advice if you’re trying to write something hard, write like nobody is ever going to see it. That’s how you get the raw stuff. My favourite sentences in the book are the ones that started as pages I never expected anyone to read e.g. “the wind blew so hard that pieces of the sky began to fall.” This is how I felt when I realized she was dying. That the sky was going to actually fall on me.

The other thing I didn’t expect was that writing a character based on someone you loved and lost can actually help you let them go. I needed to process those ten days with my Grandma, and then separately I needed to process that she was gone. There were moments where I’d reach a junction in the story and know my Grandma would have done A, but the character needed to do B for the story to work. Choosing B, every time, was its own small step towards letting her go.

Part two. How do you write your own family’s story.

Every single family has a story. Not all of them are as wild as the one that got told at our Shabbat table about the great-aunt from Golders Green in London who married the Chief Justice of Zanzibar.

But every family, especially Jewish families, carries raw material. Events like the Holocaust and others of that scale, belong to some families and not everyone. The smaller markings of a good story e.g. love, immigration, loss, scandal, faith actually make a book worth reading and those belong to everyone.

I am always clear that this is a work of fiction. The bones of the story are true but the connective tissue has creative license, because it has to go into someone’s heart and mind, and that is a key difference between historical fiction and memoir.

Someone once likened historical fiction to a pearl necklace. Each pearl on its own is true but stringing them together creates something uniquely new. This is how I hold my true north when I write my second novel. Lots of true pearls and gems, strung together to tell a new story.

So that’s the honest answer to one line on WhatsApp.

This is the first of many. If you’ve read The Spoon and the Sea and you’ve got a question of your own, send it. I’d love to answer your question too.

1. Big effort that sounds effortless. She does all the research to invite readers into the all-consuming world she has created without rambling on with every interesting fact she found out. This is the hardest part of historical fiction, to make it seem effortless when, in fact, you have been down hours of rabbit holes into times and places and geeking out on all new interesting facts about what they ate, what they wore and how they spoke. Reading her books feels like learning history without trying, which is the hardest thing to pull off.

2. Goldilocks language. She lets the story do the work without flowery language. Her language is beautiful but it isn’t over the top. It’s just enough to make you care about the characters and appreciate the writing without too much that your eyes roll because it sounds like someone prompted ChatGPT to write a metaphor for something. It’s not too much, not too little. Just right.

3. She writes brave women we can actually be. She writes women whose courage comes in different flavours, shapes and sizes. Even in The Nightingale, where bravery was literally in the face of the Nazis and arguably the most 'dramatic’, Vianne is quiet while Isabelle is loud. They make small decisions that show how brave they are and, more importantly, how brave we can be. Living in Israel and raising 4 daughters through this war since October 7, these reminders go a long way.

4. She plays the long game. She’s patient with her own career the way she’s patient with letting her characters ooze rather than dishing it all out in long prose on page 1. I remember Kristin Hannah saying in an interview that The Nightingale didn’t take off right away. It did fine, not extraordinary, until readers found it after another one of her books became popular. I think about that a lot as I run the marathon with The Spoon and the Sea.

So dear Kristin Hannah… thank you.

My faves: The Nightingale, The Four Winds and The Great Alone

But I think the headline is wrong.

I don’t think Theo of Golden broke the rulebook. I think it is the rulebook of the new publishing world.

The Wall Street Journal’s logic is that this level of success usually follows a different route, manuscript to agent to publisher, and then some black magic happens and it becomes a hit. That was true, once upon a time. It still works, occasionally. But increasingly, you have to get in there and sell your own book.

Here’s the good news: no budget, however big, can fix a boring book, or make a stranger finish it and press it into a friend’s hands saying “you have to read this.” Word of mouth is still your best sales engine, and you can build it with patience and a shoestring budget.

This applies no matter which path you’re on. Maybe you’re signed by one of the Big Five, with a decent advance and strong launch-month sales that taper off fast. Maybe you’re with a boutique, author-friendly publisher doing real legwork on your behalf. Maybe you put your book on Amazon yourself. Distribution has changed and reach to readers has changed - both no longer gatekept by the traditional publishing infrastructure. The flipside is that you’re running a sales and marketing engine now, whether you signed up for it or not.

That’s publishing today, and it’s what the Wall Street Journal missed.

Theo of Golden sold 2.5 million-plus copies because the author’s niece did the tiresome, unglamorous, unpaid work: tracking platforms, contacting book clubs, treating every website visitor like a potential advocate. Those efforts compounded, to 3,000 copies, then enough people passed it along that it reached 125,000 copies in a single month, before any agent, before Oprah.

That’s not breaking the rules. This is what good - excellent, even - looks like, with the rulebook we’re all actually playing by now.

And it should be good news if you’ve felt the door close in traditional publishing, or felt let down by lackluster marketing from your publisher. Instead of watching with helpless frustration from the sidelines, technology and market shifts put the ball at your feet. The Theo of Golden playbook proves that a great book can find its readers.

So how do you stay motivated while you tinker and chip away, playing marketer when you’d rather be writing?

I keep coming back to something Kristin Hannah once said in a podcast interview (forgive me, I can’t remember which one, I’ve listened to so many). The Nightingale didn’t take off right away. It did fine, but it didn’t catch fire. Then one of her other books did well, and readers of that book discovered The Nightingale, and it became a phenomenon.

Your book doesn’t need a big marketing budget. It needs patience, conviction, and creativity. And if you wrote a book, you already have all three in spades.

Congrats to Allen Levi, and his niece, on the success, and on a beautiful book.

The collapse of Australia’s leading writers’ festival is the latest chapter in the Australian Jewish experience since October 7, signaling that even after the Bondi Beach terror attack, little has changed within the cultural and academic establishment.

The decision to remove Randa Abdel-Fattah, one of Australia’s most prominent pro-Palestinian activists, authors and academics, from the Adelaide Writers’ Festival triggered national headlines, open letters, and high-profile resignations. Within days, the board stepped down and the festival was cancelled altogether.

The controversy has been framed as a free speech crisis, even a witch-hunt. It is nothing of the sort.

Abdel-Fattah was not removed because she is Palestinian. She is an Australian-born academic and author who has long been embraced and platformed by Australia’s cultural institutions. She was removed because she has repeatedly promoted rhetoric that denies safety and legitimacy to anyone who believes in the right of the State of Israel to exist.

This is not a case of words taken out of context. At the tip of the iceberg, Abdel-Fattah has said that “no Zionist has the right to feel culturally safe.” She has called for 2025 to mark “the end of Israel” and all Zionists. On October 8, 2023, she changed her public image to a Hamas paraglider, describing the terrorists as “Palestinian fighters who broke out of their 16-year hostage conditions.” She has also been filmed leading children in chants of intifada on the lawn of the University of Sydney.

These statements are not metaphors or policy critiques. They are explicit, dehumanizing, and inciteful. They deny safety and legitimacy to the overwhelming majority of Australia’s Jewish community.

For years, this language was tolerated and rewarded. Abdel-Fattah was elevated as a moral authority on anti-racism and embraced by institutions that claimed to stand for inclusion. That context matters, because it explains why her removal, when it finally came, did not look like a moral reckoning.

When Abdel-Fattah was first removed, it appeared less a principled stand than a panicked attempt to avoid scrutiny. After the Bondi Beach terror attack, institutions that had long championed voices like hers suddenly grew nervous. In their own recorded words, the men who murdered Jews at a Hanukkah celebration condemned “Zionists” as part of their motivation, echoing rhetoric that had gone unchecked in public discourse for years.

What followed was more revealing still. Faced with backlash, the festival did not stand behind even that belatedly correct decision. Instead, it collapsed entirely. In doing so, Australia’s cultural establishment signaled that drawing a clear line between violent rhetoric and violent action remains culturally unacceptable, even after Bondi Beach.

The hypocrisy is impossible to ignore. The same institutions and public figures now invoking the sanctity of free expression showed no such concern when Jewish and Israeli voices were excluded.

Since October 7, Australia’s cultural and academic scene quietly dropped Israeli guests or stopped inviting them altogether. Jewish professionals with any connection to Israel were deemed too controversial to appear. In 2024, Abdel-Fattah herself petitioned the Adelaide Festival board to rescind the invitation to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

There were no resignations then. No anguished statements. No open letters. Just silence.

I know this from personal experience.

Before October 7, I was an Australian-Israeli author publicly celebrated by Australia’s literary establishment. My first novel, The Spoon and the Sea, was a Vogel Literary Award finalist and signed by a leading agency. After October 7, everything changed. Not because I called for harm or violence, but because my Jewish and Israeli identity suddenly made me unacceptable.

That is what it actually looks like to be silenced for who you are.

Against that backdrop, the outrage over Abdel-Fattah’s removal feels jarring. Unlike the many Jewish writers sidelined in recent years, she was not excluded for her identity. She was removed for words she had proudly and repeatedly amplified over many years.

The Jewish community is asking for consistency, not special treatment. If non-violent Jewish and Israeli voices could be excluded without apology or institutional collapse, those same institutions cannot plausibly claim shock when genuinely dangerous rhetoric is finally withdrawn from the public stage.

The real scandal is not that a megaphone was withdrawn, but that it took panic rather than principle to do so, and that institutions crumbled almost immediately when asked to stand by it. This hypocrisy leaves Australian Jews with a stark question: has anything truly changed, or is this simply another chapter in the same story?

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I grew up as a true blue Aussie, or so I thought. My childhood was hours in the ocean, playing netball, and lazy Sunday barbecues. It was, in almost every sense, a carefree life in “the lucky country.”

When I wasn’t out and about looking, acting, and sounding like every other Australian, I was at my Jewish day school. The one with security guards outside. One guard wasn’t enough. Each family also volunteered one parent to a daily security roster. We implicitly knew that, as Jewish kids, we were targets.

For the most part, I socialised within the Jewish community. Netball was the one part of my life where I was the only Jew.

One day, a netball friend, Cassie, invited me over to her house. She had a beautiful home with a pool house. I was 12 or 13 and my first thought was, “Great. If I need to hide, maybe I could live in Cassie’s pool house.”

How unnatural that this was the natural thought of an Australian child, whose only enemies should have been mosquitoes, magpies, and sharks.

After October 7, Cassie (and her mum) were the only non-Jewish friends who reached out to me. They asked how I was doing, and how was the vibe in Israel. They said they felt the world had gone mad. They said they stood with Israel.

As I finally come up for air as an Israeli who has lived through the fear, heartbreak, and loss of this war for two years, it’s Chanukah.

At an outdoor community candle-lighting event identical to those I attended for 24 years growing up in Australia, the global intifada lands on Bondi Beach.

Many Jewish Australians are confronting the harsh truth that living in Australia is not an insurance policy against the dark, brutal side of antisemitism. Others are grappling with the feeling that this is not their Australia, and wondering where everything went wrong.

I feel the pain of Bondi Beach as both a local and an outsider.

I see what Israel and the rest of the world see: the writing on the wall, telling Australia’s Jews that it’s time for fight or flight.

But in my mind’s eye, I also see my sundowners at the beach. The eskies full of smoked salmon bagels (it is a Jewish event, after all). The warm summer air that comes with Chanukah in the southern hemisphere.

Where do we go from here?

What is the answer?

I don’t know.

But if I have one message for my Australian Jewish community, it comes from A. D. Gordon, the Zionist thinker and pioneer. He wrote prolifically about light versus darkness. The task is not to curse the darkness, he argued, but to add light.

Again and again.

Jews of the world, add light. Again and again.

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Time management is my superpower. If I have 20 minutes, I answer emails while heating up dinner. If I have 90 minutes, I edit a chapter. If I have three minutes, I unload the dishwasher. I rarely start something that I cannot reasonably finish.

On the last Shabbat of February, another round of war with Iran began. By now, after two years of practice, I know that war does not share its schedule.

Missiles do not arrive in neat calendar invites. We can have 12 alerts in a row and then nothing for hours. The sirens seem to operate by Murphy’s Law, piercing the air just as we heat milk for coffee, step into the shower, or sit down.

Very quickly, I’m thrown. Do I have two minutes or two hours? There is no way to know, and the unpredictability unsettles me, even after so many rounds of this.

My rule to never start what I cannot finish becomes impossible to keep. If I begin editing a chapter and the siren sounds, I abandon the sentence mid-thought and waddle with three small girls to the bomb shelter. If I start a load of laundry, I may not return to hang it. If I risk stepping into the shower while my husband is on reserve duty, I send a joking text to friends: Prepare for a missile within minutes.

So I wait, hovering in the in-between. I sit at the kitchen table, looking at a mug of cold milk (is it worth heating up?), not opening Slack, not opening the manuscript, not pressing play on the washing machine. I tell myself I cannot begin because I may not be allowed to finish.

And then there is no siren. Ten minutes pass. Thirty. An hour. I feel the itch of wasted time, the old instinct to optimize rising in my chest. I could have done something. I could have answered that message, edited that page, or moved the laundry along.

War is the thief of time; it steals the certainty of it. It breaks the contract we assume with the day: that the next hour will resemble the last. That a task begun may be carried through to its end. But war is also the giver of time. When you surrender the illusion of control, it doesn’t necessarily lead to helplessness.

If the baby is tired now, she naps now. Not because a nap fits the schedule, but because her eyelids are drooping and, for now, it’s quiet. If the children are asleep in the bomb shelter, I sit on the couch and watch a mindless TV show.

Three days in, we’ve done a mountain of puzzles and stuck a thousand stickers before lying close together while the siren wails outside and the booms sound at a distance I no longer try to calculate. War is a reminder of the finite nature of time.

Intermingled with the fear is an unexpected abundance. We squash and squeeze into the bomb shelter for what my six-year-old calls “family night.” The neat lines that make our busy life manageable dissolve into a different logic: Do what you can, when you can, and enjoy it. When there is a break in the sirens, we race outside so the kids can jump on the trampoline. We move toward fresh air and fun when it is available, without waiting.

War narrows the future tense and makes the next hour opaque. It strips away the certainty of time and shows me how much of my sense of competence is built on assumptions. In exchange for what it takes, war gives permission to loosen the plan and remember that time, whether days of regular life or minutes between sirens, is a gift, not a gap.

I do not romanticize this. War is scary. When this is over, I want my husband home, my kids to resume their routine learning, play dates, and activities. I want to work and write in uninterrupted stretches. I want to shower without hesitation and make coffee without monitoring for the next explosion.

But I hope that when we go back to the busyness of life, something remains. Not the sound of the siren or the danger it brings, but the understanding that life is always uncertain. That even in peace, the next hour is not guaranteed.

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It feels like when a yoga instructor tells you to unclench your toes and only then do you notice how tightly you’ve been gripping. For two years, we’ve carried the weight of a stone on our hearts, grown used to its heaviness, to the way it changed our posture.

Today, it lifted and we have to relearn ourselves without it.

That night, we lit a yahrzeit candle on Simchat Torah, the Hebrew date of October 7.

At Jewish weddings, we break a glass just before we shout mazal tov. In our most joyous moment, it becomes intertwined with memory. The words we recall “If I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy” are a promise to hold grief and happiness in the same breath.

Lighting that candle on this day felt like that.

So yes, today, hope returned.

But it’s not the naïve kind that forgets. It’s the kind that of hope from our anthem Hatikvah, that knows loss, walks hand in hand with memory, and can disappear again if we don’t learn from how we got here.

Hello hope, my old friend. Stay a while.

Hummus? Eggplant? Something spicy?

I just couldn’t choose.

And then I found myself walking the aisles picking out the most random items, tossing things into the cart like a woman told they have hours left to live. Heck, how have I gone 33 years and never had this… weird biscuit thing?

Blinking into the sunlight as we emerge from twelve days of war with the Iranian regime, everyone is feeling the whiplash in different ways.

It’s the aching legs.

The argument about nothing.

The unproductive hours of ‘work’.

Still waking up at night.

Should I shower or will there be a siren? Oh wait…

The gravitational pull away from the news and onto Ginny and Georgia.

There’s a unique kind of whiplash for parents. We spent those twelve days shielding our kids from the scary and bad things outside.

We absorbed it all and smiled through bedtime stories, quickly turning down the phone alerts before they heard it. We hid tears behind kitchen counters and checked the news while they were busy playing.

And now, as the dust settles just enough to see, our nervous systems are catching up and letting out the stress and fear we absorbed for them, and didn’t let ourselves feel in real time.

As I unpack the items from the shopping bags (and wonder what I was thinking), I wonder if this is part of the resilience everyone talks about.

Is this just the part of ‘bouncing back’ that’s closer to the floor than the sky? Maybe that famous Start Up Nation spirit takes a minute to unwind and eat weird biscuits.

As I place the challah on the table, I’m reminded that while the twelve days ended with a ceasefire, it’s far from over. For some families, this is the first Shabbat with a chair left heartbreakingly empty, their son or husband killed in battle this week. The number of families with someone missing at the Shabbat table continues to grow. And for those whose loved one is still held hostage in Gaza, every Shabbat is another unbearable wait.

So if you ask me, what is the real essence of our resilience? It’s knowing that we would run back into the shelters again and again (and again, and again) to bring them home.

We would do it all over again, in a heartbeat.

My five-year-old sat up, blinking in confusion.

“I thought I slept all night in my own bed,” she said. Her face fell. “Now I won’t get a sticker.”

My middle daughter asked why she wasn’t having her third birthday party. I promised her she would still get a purple Tinker Bell cake.

Each evening begins the same surreal routine, soundtracked by alerts on our phones:

Stay near shelter.
Iran has launched a barrage.
GET TO SHELTER NOW.
It’s over for now, but don’t go far.

We watch the news on mute and text our friends throughout the night, checking that this round of Iranian roulette didn’t land on their homes.

My oldest lies on a mattress on the floor, clutching her pink lion. My middle daughter sprawls across our bed, arms around her Dumbo. How much of this will they remember? I wonder. The baby sleeps in her bassinet, chest rising and falling, blissfully unaware.

I lie under the steel window shield with the white noise machine on full blast, hoping to keep the sound of the explosions at bay. Will they remember the weird night they still got a sticker, even though they woke up in our bed? Will they remember that their third birthday party got canceled?

When these thoughts began to spiral, I am comforted by the thought of the bag in the cupboard of the mamad. I packed it after October 7, when the threats began to pile on top of each other: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. And, always in the background, Iran. We didn’t know if we would be sent to the shelter for an hour, or a night, or a week—only that we had to be ready.

The cupboard door jams because the bag is so big—stuffed with supplies and memories. This war, like every war, pulls memories to the surface. Not just our own, but the ones we’ve inherited. Some are passed down like unwanted heirlooms. Others are sewn into our minds before we even understand what we’ve lived through.

Throwing tins of fruit and chocolate biscuits in the bag, I think of my grandmother. She grew up in London during the Blitz, sleeping in underground tube stations as bombs fell overhead. She used to tell me about the whistling of the Doodlebug just before it hit. Even into her nineties, living in Australia, she kept a laundry cupboard stocked for the next Blitz: tinned fruit and chocolate biscuits, just in case.

My husband adds to the bag a spare light and a battery-powered generator. He was five years old, in Israel, during the Gulf War. He remembers the gas masks, the sealed rooms, the rolled-up towels pressed under the door. He remembers his baby brother, too small for a mask, being placed inside a plastic box with holes punched for air. He remembers long hours of darkness when the power went out. He packs all of that into the bag.

I feel triumphant as we pack diapers, wipes and formula. In April 2024, during another Iranian attack, I sat in the mamad, preparing for an embryo transfer. We survived, and so did the embryo. In October, Iran attacked again. This time, I was pregnant, and could feel the baby kicking. Now, in June 2025, that baby is here, sleeping peacefully in a bassinet. Despite everything, we have brought new Jewish life into the world.

I don’t know if this war will last days, weeks, or months. But I do know this: there’s a bag in the cupboard, packed with reminders that we have been here before and have made it through. If my kids remember anything from these terrifying nights, I hope they remember this too.

Am Yisrael Chai.