The Best Place On Earth

May 6, 2013
This short story collection is a fiction debut for Tsabari, but it demonstrates that she is already a talented storyteller. An Israeli of Yemeni descent who immigrated to Canada in 1998, she perceptively observes life and its differences in Israel and Canada while skilfully inhabits a broad range of characters and voices. A man longs for his lost love. A Yemeni-Israeli grandmother travels to Toronto to see her first grandson, only to discover that her daughter and son-in-law refuse to have him circumcised according to their tradition. A Filipina caregiver lives a precarious existence as an illegal worker in Israel. Tsabari writes about her characters' near misses when suicide bombers fulfill their mission, marriages stung by unfaithfulness, and sisters struggling to reconnect and close the distance between their lives in Jerusalem and Vancouver. Her writing has an immediacy and power that invites readers into her characters' psyches: "Reuma lost her daughter over and over again: first she became Ashkenazi, then Canadian; it was in her melody of speaking, the polite words she'd started peppering her sentences with, the way she smiled at passersby on the streetâ¦. A stranger. And now she was no longer Jewish." Tsabari' characters will step off the page to captivate readers. Distribution: HarperCollins Canada