Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction
In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound
for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of
adventure and change when all things seem possible.
Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country,
she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel
Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and
disparate as the city itself. She falls in love with a man who is not
what he seems when she becomes an unwitting spy for a nation fighting to
be born. When I Lived in Modern Times is "an unsentimental
coming-of-age story of both a country and a young immigrant . . . that
provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed"
(Publishers Weekly, starred review).