There is a desperate relevance to this book; its author has a Jewish mother and a Palestinian father, and she tells the story of the courtship, marriage and fractured lives of a Jewish girl and a Palestinian boy.Her characters meet in London in the 1960s. Jude is the granddaughter of Rebecca, who grew up in Kishinev, Russia, lost her mother and baby brother in a pogrom, and eventually found her way to Newcastle, where she married a fellow refugee. Salim has come (via Nazareth) from Jaffa, where he lived until he was seven in a house surrounded by orange trees. In 1948 the Irgun, a paramilitary Zionist group, invaded Jaffa as the British army left it, and Salim’s family was forced to flee to his sister’s home in Nazareth; he lost the chance to harvest the fruit from his own par