It's easier to reach Heaven than the end of the street - Emma Williams

In August 2000 Emma Williams arrived with her three small children in Jerusalem to join her husband and to work as a doctor. A month later the Palestinian intifada erupted. For the next three years, she was to witness an astonishing series of events in which hundreds of thousands of lives, including her own, were turned upside down.

Williams lived on the very border of East and West Jerusalem, working with Palestinians in Ramallah during the day and spending evenings with Israelis in Tel Aviv. Weaving personal stories and conversations with friends and colleagues into the long and fraught political background, Williams' powerful memoir brings to life the realities of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. She vividly recalls giving birth to her fourth child during the siege of Bethlehem, and her horror when a suicide bomber blew his own head into the schoolyard where her children played each day.

Understanding in her judgement, yet unsparing in her honesty, Williams exposes the humanity as well as the hypocrisy at the heart of both sides' experiences. Anyone wanting to understand this intractable and complex dispute will find this unique account a refreshing and an illuminating read.

Emma Williams read history at Oxford and medicine at London University. She has worked as a doctor in Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, New York, South Africa and Jerusalem. From 2000-2003 she was the correspondent for the Spectator and wrote for several other newspapers about Palestinian-Israeli affairs and her own experiences.

'Emma Williams has pulled off an amazing literary and journalistic feat - a study of modern Israel that shows the best and the worst on each side of the tragedy, and which engages our sympathy with both. She writes beautifully'
Boris Johnson

'I loved it from the first sentence. The story-telling, the writing, the people all give you a feeling that it's happening right in front of your eyes. As a journalist who covered the agony of these last torturous years, I found Emma's book the best account I've read of the tragedy that took the Palestinians and Israelis hostage'
Daniel Ben-Simon

'A fascinating account of day-to-day family life in Jerusalem amidst trouble, turmoil and terrorism. Emma Williams is an honest, fair-minded, humane, highly intelligent young English woman with a passion for justice who turns out to be an elegant, perceptive, delightful writer'
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr

'Provocative, wryly observed and stuffed full of larger-than-life characters and bittersweet stories from both sides of the Intifada: you may not agree with Emma Williams' stance but it will be hard to put down this memoir of a mother watching a land she came to help gradually tearing itself apart'
John Micklethwait, author of THE RIGHT NATION