Shortlisted for the Best of the Orange Best 2010 by the Orange Prize Youth Panel.
A naïve young Jewish woman, Evelyn, moves to Israel, the Promised Land, in 1946. The country is coping with an influx of refugees and gradually Evelyn’s eyes are opened to the complexities of a country coping with the displaced. A interesting and thought provoking novel.
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).
