People often ask me where The Spoon and the Sea is set.
I never know quite where to start.
The novel moves across continents and generations from Golders Green to British Mandate Palestine, through Zanzibar and the Gulf, and finally to Jerusalem. But the real story is much smaller: a mother, a son, and the quiet work of finding each other again after too long apart.
Some places were easier to write than others. Most obviously: Jerusalem. I live in Israel, so that part came with a certain tactile familiarity: the stone, the dry air, the noise, the way time seems layered and uneven. The scenes in the dementia care centre are fictional, but the garden there is based very specifically on one I sat in every day during my grandmother’s final weeks. I wrote it from memory, but I didn’t have to reach very far.
Other settings required more distance - sometimes historical, sometimes emotional. Writing about Zanzibar, for instance, meant reconstructing a place that no longer exists in quite the same way. My cousin Shushi was instrumental in helping paint vivid scenes from his own memories and photos. And with places like British Mandate Palestine, this is where I can geek out. In many ways I am an old soul and this is the era I was born for. It probably has a lot to do with Exodus by Leon Uris, introduced to it from the tender age of 7 because my dad is named after Ari Ben Canaan.
Yes, there’s a lot of ground covered in the novel. But in a way, I think that’s the point. The physical distances only highlight the emotional ones and the possibility of crossing them.
So maybe the book is set in all those places.
Or maybe it’s set in the space between people, and what it takes to close it.