A Jealous God

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Bored by her marriage with Eric, ambivalent about her children, and ridden with guilt about her aged mother, Helen Harding is at an age when memory begins its slow and pernicious invasion of the present.Unexpectedly she meets up with her estranged stepbrother Michael and finds herself precipitated back into a past that has long been shut away - a childhood haunted by the mythic figure of her father, who died in the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, and a womanhood dominated by her conflicting love for Michael himself and her father's brutal, disturbing friend Dennis Killin.Helen's quest for the jealous god of the past is set against a shifting backdrop of England, Cyprus, and Israel. With sensitivity and perception the novel explores a woman's life and the forces that act upon it. Who is the father of Helen's daughter? What was her own mother's relationship with Killin? And above all, what really happened to her father in those tormented days when the British Mandate in Palestine drew to a bloody close?