Safekeeping

"Safekeeping, Jessamyn Hope's luminous, irreverent, and ambitious first novel, shows how a single item - a medieval brooch made by a Jewish artisan for his wife - connects people across time and history. Full of romance, tragedy, betrayal, and the constant reminder that chaos is a driving force in everyone's story, Safekeeping is a wise and memorable debut by a novelist of great talent and originality." -Boston Globe

"It's a page-turner that satisfies all the cravings of escapist reading while meeting the real world head-on." -Montreal Gazette

A dazzling debut novel about love, loss, and the courage it takes to keep starting over.

It's 1994 and Adam, a drug addict from New York City, arrives at Kibbutz Sadot Hadar with a medieval sapphire brooch. To redress a past crime, he must give the priceless family heirloom to a woman his grandfather loved when he was a Holocaust refugee on the kibbutz fifty years earlier. But first, he has to track this mystery woman down - a task that proves more complicated than expected.

On the kibbutz Adam joins other lost souls trying to turn their lives around: Ulya, the ambitious and beautiful Soviet émigrée; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir, the Israeli teenager wounded in a bus bombing; Eyal, the disillusioned kibbutz secretary; and Ziva, the old Socialist Zionist firebrand who founded the kibbutz. Driven together by the confines of the commune, by love and hate, by their irreconcilable dreams and a shared sense of insecurity, their fates become forever entangled as they each get one last shot at redemption.

In the middle of that fateful summer glows the magnificent brooch with its perilous history spanning three continents and seven centuries. With insight and beauty, Safekeeping tackles that most human of questions: How can we expect to find meaning and happiness when we know that nothing lasts?